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INDIVIDUALISM AND 
INDIVIDUALITY 





INDIVIDUALISM AND 
INDIVIDUALITY 


In the Philosophy of 
John Stuart Mill — 


By 
CHARLES LARRABFE STREET, Ph.D. 


With an appendix of Mill’s Review of 
G. C. Lewis’ “Use and Abuse of Political Terms” 


MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 


MILWAUKEE 


COPYRIGHT BY 
MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
MILWAUKEE, Wis. 

1926 


Preface 


The material which goes to make up this book has been 
accumulated during a number of years of interest in Mill’s 
life and writings. Even in our own time, with its increasing 
historical perspective, Mill continues to be thought of pri- 
marily as an exponent of utilitarianism, the association 
psychology, “classical” economic theory, and various brands 
of political reform. It seems worth while to emphasize his 
warm and winning personality, and to show that underlying 
all his interest in economic and social reform was a predomi- 
nant interest in the development of individuality as the only 
satisfactory basis for social life. 

In the business of writing this essay Professor Herbert 
C. Schneider of Columbia University has given generously 
of his time and interest. Grateful acknowledgment is due 
also to Professors John Dewey, Emery Neff, and R. G. 
Tugwell for valuable criticism and suggestions. Io Profes- 
sor Dickinson S. Miller, formerly of Columbia University 
and the General Theological Seminary, now of Smith Col- 
lege, an ardent admirer of John Stuart Mill, I owe a debt 
of gratitude that I cannot well express. 

Go Les: 
THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH HOUSE 
AT THE 
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 
AUGUST, 1926 





Table of Contents 


CHAPTER PAGE 
Il. INTRODUCTION SIRNA DY Glia a yA eetiRitea ite I 


Il. THe INDIVIDUALISM OF THE Earty UTILITAR- 
CARES ON et Oh UNS eA Fa edad alae at cod ala 


III. Some ImporTANT FRIENDSHIPS . . . . . I9 


IV. THE INTERNAL CULTURE OF THE INDIVIDUAL 39 


V. INDIVIDUALITY AND POLITICAL Economy . . 61 
VI. INDIVIDUALITY AND GOVERNMENT... .. 82 
MOLES eRPVUAND: INDIVIDUALITY (6050000 oi) va aecel GO 
BIBLIO RAP ELV. iyo (cle Satay RUN ane FUCA 


APPENDIX. J. S. Mitu’s Review oF The Use and 
PPUEE OF TOUlICaL: Lermsy Coat Ce ek ee 


Re a 





Chapter I. 


Introduction. 


“Everyone who wants to see our nation well governed,” 
says Ex-president Hadley of Yale University in a recent 
volume of lectures entitled Liberty and Equality, “is crying 
out for some new issue on which parties shall be organized 
and by which American politics may be rescued from the 
chaos into which they have fallen. The one issue big enough 
for the purpose—big enough to transcend the appeal of 
business interest or class feeling or local prejudice—is the 
issue between liberty and equality; the relative importance 
from the standpoint of the nation of allowing our citizens 
to develop their own powers in their own way—the claim 
of liberty—or of having all citizens given opportunities as 
nearly equal as possible for the pursuit of happiness—the 
claim of social justice. The man who has studied the history 
of liberty and equality and has thought out the lessons of 
that history is likely to have the same advantage over the 
mere opportunist in dealing with the politics of the next 
twenty years that Lincoln had in his day over those who 
thought that the slavery question could be settled by expe- 
dients like the Kansas-Nebraska Bill or doctrines like that 
of squatter sovereignty.” * 

The issue that Ex-president Hadley indicates is one that 
has appeared in many different forms and many different 
places. It is to be seen not only in the conflict between liberty 


1A. T. Hadley, Liberty and Equality, pp. 1-2. 


2 Individualism Versus Individuality 


and equality, but with a little different emphasis in the 
conflict between individualism and collectivism, and between 
liberalism and socialism as economic programs. It has a 
close relation to the conflict between freedom and authority. 
In the nineteenth century, both in England and in our own 
country, both these sets of tendencies have at different times 
loudly proclaimed themselves on the side of youth and 
progress. When we examine the course of forward-looking 
opinion, we seem to see in it two currents. One is represented 
by the type of individual who looks about on the inefficiency 
and lack of organization, the waste of effort and of life 
that surround him, and says, ‘“What is needed is more intelli- 
gence, more direction by experts of the lives of this roiling 
mass which is humanity, direction by experts who are versed 
in the ways of government, and who, if they were given a 
free hand, could lead mankind into the paths of prosperity 
and peace.’ The other class is represented by the individual 
who says, ‘“Man’s greatest heritage is freedom; it is better 
to be poor and ignorant and dirty, than to be taught and 
washed and made prosperous by the despotism of others, 
however benevolent that despotism may be.” These two types 
of attitude may be seen more or less clearly opposed to one 
another in almost all the controversies that trouble mankind, 
in politics, national and international, in the Church, and 
in the family. Whether it be the League of Nations, Prohibi- 
tion, Marriage and Divorce, or any one of a thousand other’ 
questions, sooner or later the parties to the controversy find 
themselves gravitating toward this distinction. One group 
cries “Personal liberty,” “Individual freedom,” ‘‘National 
sovereignty” (as opposed to Leagues of Nations and World 
Courts). The other group cries “Efficiency,” “Organization,” 
or “Combination for mutual benefit.” Both of these points 
of view may be philosophies of progress—both, that is, may 
be opposed to that sort of unreflective conservatism that 
sees danger in any departure from the status guo. But at 


Introduction 3 


different times each of them has been pressed into service 
as an argument for conservatism, as at other times each has 
been the battle cry of reform. 

As we study concrete social situations now it seems obvi- 
ous enough that these are not two principles eternal in them- 
selves and eternally and unalterably set over against one 
another, but rather attitudes of mind, points of view, ideas 
about ways of getting things done (in part ideas about what 
things are worth doing), which must be brought together 
in judicious combination if a progressively more satisfactory 
social state of things is to be achieved. But there are still 
people who fail to see this, who declare themselves unquali- 
fiedly as Socialists, or Individualists, or Liberals, with some 
echo of the old meaning, or, if they be more philosophically 
inclined, try to find a solution of this “problem” in general 
terms. They take the names of tendencies or movements that 
have grown up in specific historical situations, spell them 
with capitals, and put them behind historical events as dei ex 
machina. Then they spend the rest of their lives trying to 
solve the problem which the hypostatization of these general 
terms has created. Ex-president Hadley would seem to be 
one of these people. And the inconclusiveness of the volume 
of lectures from which the foregoing quotation is taken 
would suggest that there is something unreal about his prob- 
lem or wrong with his method. 

But Ex-president Hadley is eternally right when he 
emphasizes the importance of historical investigation as a 
preliminary to intelligent dealing with present day problems. 
And if, following his suggestion, we were to study the “his- 
tory of liberty and equality,’ we could find no more signifi- 
cant period upon which to center our efforts than England 
during the middle fifty years of the last century. And we 
could find no better individual upon whom to direct our 
attention than John Stuart Mill. In his life and his writing 
the problem of the relation of the individual to the social 


4 Individualism Versus Individuality 


group seems to focus itself uniquely. But when we turn to 
the consideration of Mill’s philosophy, this same danger 
confronts us—of creating artificial problems and then trying 
vainly to find an answer. Many of the studies of John Stuart 
Mill that have been made in the past have fallen into this 
error. Critics start with categories of their own and try to 
fit the thinkers of past years into those categories, in place 
of starting the other way around and asking what concretely 
a given individual’s problems were, and how, in his own 
terms, he tried to solve them. On the one hand it has been 
customary to think of John Stuart Mill as the inheritor from 
Jeremy Bentham and James Mill of the leadership of the 
forces of social and economic liberalism. But on the other 
hand we find in his writings much that seems to be the very 
opposite of this liberalism and of the individualism on which 
it was based. Leslie Stephen says that the latter part of his 
life Mill was ‘“‘well on the way to State Socialism.” * Mill 
looked with favor upon the plan of operation by the govern- 
ment of railroads and other industries that had to be carried 
on on a large scale.* In the Autobiography he says: “I shall 
look forward to the time when the rule that they who do 
not work shall not eat will be applied not to paupers only, 
but impartially to all; and when the division of the produce 
of labour, instead of depending, in so great a degree as it 
now does, on the accident of birth, will be made by concert 
on an acknowledged principle of justice.” Having this ideal, 
he “regarded all existing institutions and social arrangements 
as merely provisional, and welcomed with the greatest pleas- 
ure and interest all Socialistic experiments by select indi- 
viduals.” * 

So we find a perplexing inconsistency in Mill’s social 


* Leslie Stephen, English Utilitarians, Vol. III. p. 230. 

SJ. S. Mill, Political Economy, Vol. 1. p. 190. 

*J. S. Mill, Autobiography (Columbia University Press, 1925) pp. 162, 
164. 


Introduction 5 


philosophy if we ask whether he favored economic liberalism 
or socialism, or try to place him arbitrarily in the conflict 
between “individualism” and ‘‘collectivism” which was going 
on in England during those years. But this question and 
others like it perplex because they are based on false assump- 
tions. As far as John Stuart Mill is concerned, an analysis 
of social philosophy in England in the nineteenth century in 
terms of individualism and collectivism does not help very 
much. Mill himself did not think of the problems he was 
up against in these terms. He did not allow his attitude to be 
determined by “’isms.”’ He maintained, to be sure, a certain 
loyalty to the Utilitarian tradition, even though in developing 
it and redefining it he made some radical changes. There 
were other Utilitarians, the Grotes and Francis Place among 
them, who looked askance at what they considered his hetero- 
doxy. And when Mill speaks of ‘‘Utilitarianism as understood 
by its best teachers” as holding this or that doctrine, we 
must confess to a suspicion that the circle of these ‘‘best 
teachers” is pretty much confined to Mill himself. But the 
truth of the matter is that Mill’s real interest was in solving 
certain problems which presented themselves to him. He cared 
more about that than he did about the label that his particular 
solution might wear. 

And yet, from our point of view, looking back over the 
development of English thought during the last hundred 
years, there can be seen a very definite line of development 
running through the thought of the early Utilitarians, and 
their youthful champion of the second generation. The con- 
necting link in this development is in the idea of the individ- 
ual. Individualism is as much the key to John Stuart Mill’s 
social philosophy as it is to the philosophy of his teachers. 
Only—and this is the important point—John Stuart Mill’s 
individualism was a different sort of individualism. It was 
fuller and richer, and laid more emphasis on the inner devel- 
opment of the individual. The purpose of this book is not to 


6 Individualism Versus Individuality 


place Mill with regard to certain schools of thought or to 
try to show his relation to a hypothetical conflict between 
the principles of liberty and equality, or individualism and 
socialism. It is rather to ask what were Mill’s own concrete 
problems ?—how did he see them ?—how, in his own terms, 
did he attempt to solve them? Its thesis is that the expanding 
idea of individuality, and a growing concern for individuality 
in society (which was directly related to his own growing 
personality) played an important part in Mill’s thought and 
is essential to the understanding of his social and political 
philosophy. 


Chapter II. 


The Individualism of the Early Utihtarians. 


v 


The early Utilitarians had much to say about “the indi- 
vidual.” But for them the individual was an abstraction. 
Jeremy Bentham and James Mill were not interested at all 
in real individuals or individuality. Bentham was looking 
for a philosophy of legal reform and for a safe and business- 
like government. James Mill was looking for general prin- 
ciples on which an objective science of government and 
economics and psychology might be based. Bowring’s remark 
that “the further men wander from simplicity the further 
they are from truth” is typical of their point of view.’ For 
method they turned to the sciences. Mathematics, physics, 
and astronomy were their chief guides. They used the method 
that had proved so fruitful in these fields, namely that of 
trying to explain complex phenomena in terms of the simple 
behaviour of simple units, regarded as being practically alike 
and having their relation to each other determined by a few 
simple laws. It was this method that had shown its value 
in chemistry in the shape of the atomic theory. And it is 
significant that Bentham had studied chemistry under For- 
dyce, and James Mill was a friend of Thomas Thompson. 

This was James Mill’s approach to psychology, where 
the atoms were ideas, connected by the laws of association. 


*Caroline Fox, Memoirs of Old Friends, p. 24. 


8 Individualism Versus Individuality 


Says James Mill at the beginning of the Analysis of the 
Human Mind: 


“Philosophical inquiries into the human mind have for their 
main and ultimate object, the exposition of its more complex 
phenomena. 

“Tt is necessary, however, that the simple should be premised 
because they are the elements of which the complex are formed; 
and because a distinct knowledge of the elements is indispensable 
to an accurate conception of that which is compounded of them.” * 


Their social inquiry was characterized by the same meth- 
od. Here, again, they tried to explain complex phenomena 
in terms of simple units, connected by simple laws. The atom 
here was the “individual.” But they were not particularly 
interested in the individuals they met on the street. “The 
individual” was for them simply the atom in their social 
chemistry, the “element” out of which the “complex” is 
formed. He was an abstraction convenient for the purposes 
of explanation. 

One illustration from Bentham will be sufficient to show 
his use of the idea of the individual. In his discussion of 
equality, he tries to demonstrate the advantage of equality 
of possessions. He lays down five propositions: 

(1) “Each portion of wealth is connected with a corresponding 
portion of human happiness.” 

(2) “Of two individuals possessed of unequal fortunes, he 
who possesses greatest wealth will possess greatest happiness.” 

(3) “The excess of happiness on the part of the most wealthy 
will not be so great as the excess of his wealth.” 

(4) “For the same reason, the greater the disproportion 
between the two masses of wealth, the less the probability that 
there exists an equal disproportion between the masses of happi- 
ness.” 


(s) “The more nearly the actual proportion approaches to 
equality, the greater will be the total mass of happiness.” ® 


* James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Vol. I. 
ae 
* Jeremy Bentham, Works, Vol. I. p. 305. 


The Early Utilitarians 9 


We have here no suspicion that the happiness may depend 
partly on the individual characteristics of the “individuals.” 
For the purposes of his argument he had to take his “individ- 
uals” in the mass, and to regard them to all intents and 
purposes as being exactly alike. 

Furthermore these atoms are regarded as being connected 
by simple types of relationship. And this brings us to the 
second important postulate of the early Utilitarians. They 
went on the assumption that individuals are animated in all 
their actions by self-interest. Where the justification for 
this doctrine came from, it is fairly easy to see. Take the 
case of Bentham, who was a very altruistic and good natured 
person. In his efforts for the reform of the law and his 
other projects (his scheme for a model prison for one), he 
started out with the idea that everybody was like himself, 
and that people would only have to be shown a better way 
of doing things in order to adopt the better way. But he 
met with opposition all down the line. He came to feel that 
his chief enemy was not ignorance, but organized vested 
interests opposed to reform. The blind admiration of the 
status quo exhibited by Blackstone and Lord Eldon, the 
information James Mill gave him on the art of packing 
juries, his own experiences in dealing with king and parlia- 
ment—such things convinced him that there was a great 
conspiracy on the part of the “sinister interests’ against 
enlightenment and reform. ‘Judge and Co.” was the name 
which he and his followers gave to the combination of the 
government and the lawyers and the judges. The Church, 
and the vested rights it protected, he called “Jug,” short for 
“Juggernaut.” The failure of the panoptican scheme and 
the refusal of the government to repay the money which he 
had advanced in good faith to buy a site for his model prison 
made him particularly bitter. The people he had to deal with 
were out, he found, each man for himself. Self-interest, con- 
ceived as a universal motive, seemed to explain their actions 


10 Individualism Versus Individuality 


very well. James Mill, also a reformer up against wickedness 
in high places, was impressed by the same thing. Hence this 
important doctrine of the utilitarian psychology. It was 
useful as a psychological principle; it simplified explanation 
because it gave one universal motive in place of many differ- 
ent motives; and the Utilitarians found it unpleasantly and 
persistently true in their experience. It came to be a central 
element, not only in their psychology, but in their economic 
and political theory. 

But in spite of this theoretical individualism, and in spite 
of their zeal for reform, the Utilitarians had no real interest 
in individuals as individuals. With interest in personality 
there has always seemed to go a certain warmth and freedom 
and enthusiasm, and this the Utilitarians studiously avoided. 
‘There was no warmth and fire about them. John Stuart Mill 
says of his father: 

“For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything 
which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed 
the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. 
‘The intense’ was with him a bye-word of scornful disapproba- 
tion.” * 

With this there seems to have gone a certain coldness and 
aloofness in dealing with other people. Place, who had been 
seeing much of Mill and his family, writes of him in his 
diary, “He could help the mass, but he could not help the 
individual, not even himself or his own.” *® What interest 
they had in liberty had nothing to do with the development 
of personality. Liberty had an insignificant place in Bent- 
ham’s system. For the happiness of the body politic, he says, 
are necessary “subsistence, abundance, equality, and security.” 
Liberty is a “branch of security; personal liberty is security 
against a certain species of injury which affects the person, 
political liberty is security against injustice of members of 


*J. S. Mill, Autobiography, p. 49. 
° Graham Wallas, Life of Place, p. 79. 


The Early Utilitarians II 


the government.” ° To be able to look ahead and count on 
the future with some degree of confidence, is essential if 
people are to be industrious, thrifty, and saving, and if com- 
merce is to be possible. In order to bring about security, the 
Government creates rights, which it confers upon individ- 
uals. 

“To these rights correspond offenses of all classes. The law 
cannot create rights without creating the corresponding obligations. 
It cannot create rights and obligations without creating offenses. 
It can neither command nor prohibit without restraining the 
liberty of individuals. The citizen, therefore, cannot acquire any 
right without sacrificing part of his liberty.” ‘ 

“Every law is contrary to liberty.” ° 

“All government is only a tissue of sacrifices.’ ° 


fe 


It was in this tradition that John Stuart Mill was 
brought up. His father and Jeremy Bentham set themselves 
to educate him in such a way that, as Mill wrote Bentham, 
“swe may perhaps leave him a successor worthy of both of 
us.” The story of this schooling is familiar and need not 
be recounted here. After a strenuous course of study with his 
father at home, the younger Mill, at the age of fourteen, 
went to spend fourteen months with Sir Samuel Bentham, 
brother of Jeremy, in Southern France. He came back to 
England in July, 1821. The following year he read the 
story of the French Revolution and also Bentham’s philos- 
ophy in the shape of Dumont’s Traité de Législation. The 
reading of these books came at a critical time, and taken 
together had a powerful effect on his imagination. The story 
of the French Revolution filled him with zeal for the Revolu- 
tionary cause, and Bentham’s work seemed to give him 


* Bentham, Works, Vol. I. p. 302. 
™ Bentham, Works, p. 302. 
® Bentham, Works, p. 301. 
® Bentham, Works, p. 313. 


12 Individualism Versus Individuality 


precisely what was needed on the positive side, the basis 
for a program of reform. Says Mill: 


“When I laid down the last volume of the Traité I had become 
a different being. The ‘principle of utility’ understood as Bentham 
understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied 
it through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the 
keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary com- 
ponent parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my 
conceptions of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, 
a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; 
the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal 
outward purpose of a life. And I had a grand conception laid 
before me of changes to be effected in the condition of mankind 
through that doctrine.” 


He had an “object in life.” It was to be a “reformer of 
the world.” ” 

In March, 1824, appeared the first number of the West- 
minster Review, the hope and the despair of the Benthamites. 
It contained, among other articles, James Mill’s attack on 
the Edinburgh Review. In the second number John Stuart 
Mill tries his weapons against the same enemy. This article, 
and those that immediately follow it, are characterized by an 
uncompromising, uncritical, and juvenile Benthamism, 
coupled with a merciless attack on the weak points of the 
adversaries of Utilitarianism. Writing of this period of his 
life in the Autobiography, after summing up the opinions 


of James Mill and his friends, John Stuart Mill says: 


“These various opinions were seized on with youthful fanati- 
cism by the little knot of young men of whom I was one; and we 
put into them a sectarian spirit, from which, in intention at least, 
my father was wholly free. . . . Ambition and desire of dis- 
tinction I had in abundance; and zeal for what I thought the 
good of mankind was my strongest sentiment, mixing with and 
colouring all others. But my zeal was as yet little else, at that 
period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions. It had 
not its root in genuine benevolence, or sympathy with mankind; 


07. S. Mill, Autobiography, p. 93. 


The Early Utilitarians 13 


though these qualities held their due place in my ethical stand- 
ard.” 11 


Ample illustrations of this are found in the early West- 
minster Review articles. Hear, for example, the Mill of these 


years on “Liberty,” in the above mentioned article on the 
Edinburgh Review: 


“Liberty, another favourite word with the Edinburgh Review, 
is equally suited with the word ‘constitution,’ to the ends of com- 
promise. Liberty, in its original sense, means freedom from 
restraint. In this sense, every law, and every rule of morals, 
is contrary to liberty. A despot, who is entirely emancipated from 
both, is the only person whose freedom of action is complete. A 
measure of government, therefore, is not necessarily bad, because 
it is contrary to liberty; and to blame it for that reason, leads to 
confusion of ideas. But to create confusion of ideas, is essential to 
the purpose of those who have to persuade the people, that small 
abuses should be reformed, while great ones should remain un- 
touched.” » 


He had a typical early Utilitarian faith in the education 
of the masses as the road to social well-being: 


“The attention of those who wish to see an amelioration in 
the condition of the great mass of mankind ought henceforth to 
be mainly directed to the means of communicating to all that which 
is now known only to a few. The principal difficulty is overcome— 
the road to happiness is discovered—no groping, no perplexing 
research, no hopeless, thankless toil is required—all that remains 
to be done is, to remove the obstacles which conceal that road 
from the view of those who are less fortunate than ourselves.” * 


Again, in discussing an explanation in an article in the 
Edinburgh Review as to why the poor stopped sending their 
children to the Westminster Infant School where the pay- 
ment of three pence a week .was required, he says: 


“But if he (the author of this article) means to insinuate that 
they refrain from sending their children to the school because 


ay. S. Mill, Autobiography, p. 76-7. 
2 Westminster Review, Vol. 1. p. 509. 
13 Westminster Review, Vol. 4. p. 89. 


14. Individualism Versus Individuality 


they suspect the motives of the gentlemen who set it on foot, the 
absurdity is so palpable as scarcely to need a refutation. The 
idea that anyone, in determining whether he will avail himself 
of a proffered benefit, is influenced by any other considerations 
than, first whether it is really a benefit, and secondly, whether 
the cost does not exceed the advantage, almost provokes a 
laugh.” ** . 


In the fourth number of the Westminster Mill has a 
review of a book on English History, by George Brodie. The 
review is largely an attack on Hume as an historian, and 
shows the young champion of Benthamism at his fiercest: 


“Hume possessed powers of a very high order; but regard for 
truth formed no part of his character. ... Hume may very pos- 
sibly have been sincere. He may, perhaps, have been weak enough 
to believe that the pleasures and pains of one individual are of 
unspeakable importance, those of the many of no importance 
at all. But though it be possible to defend Charles I, and be an 
honest man, it is not possible to be an honest man, and defend 
him as Hume has done. 

“A skillful advocate will never tell a lie, when suppressing 
the truth will answer his purpose; and if a lie must be told, 
he will rather, if he can, lie by insinuation than by direct asser- 
tion. In all the arts of a rhetorician, Hume was a master; and 
it would be a vain attempt to describe the systematic suppression 
of the truth which is exemplified in this portion of his history; 
and which, within the sphere of our reading, we have scarcely, 
if ever, seen matched. Particular instances of this species of 
mendacity, Mr. Brodie has brought to light in abundance.” * 


In 1825 Bentham asked the younger Mill to undertake 
the task of preparing for the press his notes on Evidence, 
which finally appeared in five volumes on the Rationale of 
Judicial Evidence. This work not only gave its editor consid- 
erable knowledge of English law, but had a marked influence 
on Mill’s own style. The Westminster Review articles of 
1825, 1826, and 1827 show an increasing maturity of 
thought and structure. 


* Westminster Review, Vol. 1. p. 520. 
** Quoted by Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 34. 


The Early Utilitarians 15 
IIl. 


John Stuart Mill in the nature of the case could not, 
and, as a matter of fact, did not, remain very long satisfied 
with the system of ideas he had been defending so vocifer- 
ously. A broadening-out process began very soon. It can be 
seen in the story of Mill’s inner experience during these 
years, and in the story of his friendships. Of the inner expe- 
riences that went with his developing point of view, Mill 
provides a detailed account in the Autobiography in the 
chapter on the “Mental Crisis.” In his own words, he was 
in a “dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally 
liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excite- 
ment; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other 
times becomes insipid or indifferent.” It occurred to him to 
ask himself whether if “‘all the changes in institutions and 
opinions” which he had been looking forward to were real- 
ized, he would be really happy. “And an irrepressible self- 
consciousness distinctly answered ‘No’.” 

He says: 

“At this my heart sank within me; the whole foundation on 
which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was 
to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end 
had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any 


interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live 
for.” 16 


Mill goes on to give at some length his theory of the 
cause of this melancholy episode. His account must not be 
taken uncritically. It was written a long time after, and is in 
terms of his father’s psychology. But it is true in general 
that Mill’s later accounts of his earlier mental processes 
as given in the Autobiography, are pretty accurate. And his 
account of the mental crises, however untrue it may be as 
a matter of fact, may, at least, be accepted as a trustworthy 


6 Autobiography, p. 94. 


16 Individualism Versus Individuality 


statement of what Mill thought was the trouble with him 
at the time. He had been brought up to believe that 


“all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good 
or bad kind, were the results of association.” 

“We love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one 
sort of action or contemplation and pain in another sort, through 
the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from 
the effect of education or of experience. As a corollary from this,” 
he says, “I had always heard it maintained by my father, and 
was myself convinced, that the object of education should be 
to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; 
associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great 
whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.” 


But now he made the discovery that the “habit of analysis 
has a tendency to wear away the feelings.” If, for instance, 
you know that your feeling of pleasure over work well done 
is just the result of the long habit of associating work well 
done with the pleasure of praise and reward, there is a 
danger that the association between pleasure and work well 
done will be broken down. Thus Mill goes on to say, 
analytical habits are a 


“perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the 
virtues; and, above all, fearfully undermine all desires, and all 
pleasures, which are the effects of association, that is, according 
to the theory I held, all except the purely physical and organic; 
of the entire insufficiency of which to make life desirable, no one 
had a stronger conviction than I had.”’” 


It seemed to him that his father had taught him habits 
of analysis before these valuable associations had had time 
to become sufficiently strongly cemented: 


“T was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the com- 
mencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, 
but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had 
been so carefully fitted out to work for; no delight in virtue, 
or the general good, but also just as little in anything else. The 


Autobiography, p. 96-7. 


The Early Utilitarians 17 


fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within 
me, as completely as those of benevolence.” 

“Neither selfish nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures to me. 
And there seemed no power in nature sufhcient to begin the 
formation of my character anew, and create in a mind now 
irretrievably analytic, fresh associations of pleasure with any 
of the objects of human desire.... These were the thoughts 
which mingled with the dry heavy dejection of the melancholy 
winter of 1826-7.” * 


With the Spring of 1827 came some relief. Mill was 
reading Marmontel’s Memoirs, and came upon the passage 
where Marmontel, still a boy, comforted his family on the 
occasion of his father’s death by telling them that he would 
take his father’s place. Mill says: 

“a vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and 
I was moved to tears. From this moment my burden grew lighter. 
The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within 
me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless; I was not a stock or 


a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of which 
all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness, are made.” 


The importance of this episode is not so much that Mill 
was inspired by the example of the young Marmontel, as that 
he found that he could be moved to tears. He was not a 
stock or a stone. He was not a machine governed by reason 
and with pleasures “purely physical and organic” for motive 
power. He had honestly thought that he was. He had taken 
the doctrine of Bentham and his father literally, and found 
that it did not work. This is what makes the mental crisis 
so important in the development of his thought. 

It was at this time that he began to read Wordsworth. 
And in Wordsworth’s portrayal of objects of natural beauty, 
in his appeal to the finer sensibilities, Mill found a medicine 
for his unhappy state of mind. He discovered that there was 
“real permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation.” 

He tells us that this experience had two marked effects 


8 Autobiography, p. 98. 


18 Individualism Versus Individuality 


upon his “opinion and character.” In the first place, it con- 
vinced him that happiness was to be found not by seeking 
happiness, but by “aiming at something else’; and in the 
second place, he now saw the importance of the “internal 
culture of the individual.” But more important still, or 
perhaps underlying these two conclusions, was the discovery 
that associations of pleasure and pain with acts that are 
socially valuable are not purely artificial and arbitrary, but 
have, as Mill says in a passage in Utilitarianism which we 
will quote again before the end of this paper, “a firm founda- 
tion” in a “powerful natural sentiment”—“the social feelings 
of mankind.” The habit of analysis in Mill’s case had done 
its worst, but had not succeeded in entirely wiping out the 
feeling side of his nature after all. 

So much for Mill’s own story. But there were other 
causes for his trouble which he does not take into account. 
The trouble was partly physical, a matter of overwork with 
which the editing of Bentham on Evidence must have had 
not a little to do, and this was complicated by the spiritual 
readjustment involved when Mill began to find out that 
the scheme of salvation for the world which had seemed so 
completely satisfactory wasn’t so satisfactory after all. He 
had simply been juggling a lot of technical terms—individual, 
happiness, liberty, democracy. Now he was beginning to 
want to know what they meant. He was discovering. that 
“groping, perplexing research, hopeless, thankless toil,” was 
going to be required after all. He had to start out on an 
exploring expedition of his own, which involved at the start 
great hospitality to new points of view very different from 
the traditional Utilitarian philosophy, new friendships, new 
experiences. The story of his intellectual development is the 
story of his attempt to adapt the philosophy of his early years 
to the life and thought of a new age. 


™ Autobiography, p. 100. 


Chapter III. 


Some Important Friendships. 


I. 


Writing to Carlyle in 1834, Mill mentions a review in 
an “early number of Tait’ (1832 to be exact) which shows 
the change that had taken place in his point of view. “It 
was,” Mill says in his letter to Carlyle, “the truest paper 
I had ever written, for it was the most completely an out- 
growth of my own mind and character; not that what is 
there taught was the best I even then had to teach, nor 
perhaps did I even think it so, but it contained what was 
uppermost in me at that time, and differed from most also 
that I knew in having emanated from me, not, with more 
or less perfect assimilation, merely worked itself into me.” ’ 

It is hardly possible to imagine a greater contrast between 
the author of this review and the cocksure young prodigy 
who wrote the article on the Edinburgh Magazine and the 
review of Brodie’s History of England four or five years 
before. The article is a kind of confession. It is his own 
early sins that Mill is declaiming against. The book reviewed 
is the Use and Abuse of Political Terms by G. C. Lewis. 
As the title indicates, it is a criticism of the use of certain 
political terms (as Right, State of Nature, Liberty, Force) 
by political writers of the time, with a view to arriving at 
clear concepts and a common understanding of the things 


+J. S. Mill, Letters, Vol. I. p. 89. This review will be found re- 
printed in full as an appendix to this dissertation. 


20 Individualism Versus Individuality 


for which these terms stand. As might be expected, Mill 
applauds Mr. Lewis’ aim, though in many cases he disagrees 
with his specific conclusion. But the part of the review that 
is most interesting has only casual reference to Mr. Lewis’ 


book. 


“Mankind,” Mill says, “have many ideas, and but few words. 
This truth should never be absent from the mind of one who 
takes upon him to decide if another man’s language is philosoph- 
ical or the reverse. Two consequences follow from it; one, that 
a certain laxity in the use of language must be borne with, if 
a writer makes himself understood; the other, that, to understand 
a writer who is obliged to use the same words as a vehicle for 
different ideas, requires a vigorous effort of co-operation on the 
part of the reader.” 


And again; 


“It shall be recollected, too, that many a man has a mind 
teeming with important thoughts, who is quite incapable of 
putting them into words which shall not be liable to any meta- 
physical objection; that when this is the case, the logical inco- 
herence or incongruity of the expression is commonly the very 
first thing which strikes the mind, and that which there is least 
merit in perceiving. The man of superior intellect, in that case, 
is not he who can only see that the proposition precisely as stated 
is not true; but he who, not overlooking the incorrectness at the 
surface, does, nevertheless, discern that there is truth at the 
bottom.” 


The review closes with the following paragraph: 


“We have often thought that a really philosophical Treatise 
on the Ambiguities of the Moral Sciences would be one of the 
most valuable scientific contributions which a man of first-rate 
intellectual ability could confer upon his age, and upon posterity. 
But it would not be so much a book of criticism as of inquiry. 
Its main end would be, not to set people right in their use of 
words, which you never can be qualified to do, so long as their 
thoughts, on the subject treated of, are in any way different from 
yours; but to get at their thoughts through their words, and to 
see what sort of a view of truth can be got, by looking at it in 
their way. It would be seen, then, how multifarious are the prop- 
erties and distinctions to be marked, and how few the words to 


Some Important Friendships 21 


mark them with, so that one word is sometimes all we have to 
denote a dozen different ideas, and that men go wrong less often 
than Mr. Lewis supposes, from using a word in many senses, but 
more frequently from using it only in one, the distinctions which 
it serves to mark in its other acceptations not being adverted to 
at all. Such a book would enable all kinds of thinkers, who are 
now at daggers-drawn, because they are speaking different dia- 
lects and know it not, to understand one another, and to perceive 
that, with the proper explanations, their doctrines are reconcilable; 
and would unite all the exclusive and one-sided systems, so long 
the bane of true philosophy, by placing before each man a more 
comprehensive view, in which the whole of what is affirmative 
in his own view would be included.” 

“This is the larger and nobler design which Mr. Lewis should 
set before himself, and which, we believe, his abilities to be 
equal to did he but feel that this is the only task worthy of them. 
He might thus contribute a large part to what is probably destined 
to be the great philosophical achievement of the era, of which 
many signs already announce the commencement; viz., to unite 
all half-truths which have been fighting against one another ever 
since the creation, and blend them in one harmonious whole.” ” 


This is Mill writing in his finest spirit. The desire for 
fairness, the eagerness to understand points of view different 
from his own, is doubly significant when we recall his violent 
sectarianism of a few years before. He became, as he says 
in the Autobiography, “catholic and tolerant to an extreme 
degree.” Goethe’s device, ‘‘manysidedness,” was one which 
he would most willingly have taken for his own. And the 
confidence here expressed that it would be possible by clear 
and sympathetic thinking to “unite all exclusive and one- 
sided systems” in a more comprehensive view is a key to 
much of Mill’s activity during the following years. The 
Logic was Mill’s attempt to supply a treatise on the ambigui- 
ties of the moral sciences such as he felt the need of. Just 
how important from a social point of view Mill felt that it 
was to get the right sort of first principles will be seen in the 
next chapter. 


* Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. I. (April to Sept., 1832) p. 164. 


22. Individualism Versus Individuality 


From this time on there are two closely connected lines 
of development in Mill, which it will be worth while to 
trace out separately. The first is the story of his friendships 
and of his growing appreciation of the importance of social 
intercourse. The other is his emphasis on self-culture and 
his developing philosophy of the individual. As Mill’s own 
circle of friendships increased, he realized more concretely 
the social ties which bind individuals together, and provide 
what he calls a “firm foundation” for society. And as he 
found a new and quiet sort of happiness in the cultivation 
of the inner life for its own sake, he began to lay more 
theoretical emphasis on the importance of self-culture. The 
story of Mill’s friendships will provide the subject for this 
chapter; the development of his philosophy of the individual 
for that which follows. 


II. 


The writer of an article in the Edinburgh Review of 
January, 1874, in an unfavorable criticism of Mill’s work, 
tries to show that Mill, being starved for friendship in his 
earlier youth, at this time and later in his life made very 
strong friendships and let his ideas be dominated by the 
ideas of his friends. He says, “Most of his literary criticisms 
were suggested by the desire to make known the merits of a 
friend, and his personal predilections are manifest in all of 
them.” * The innuendo in this criticism is certainly unfair, 
but there is much literal fact in it. For Mill’s friends played 
an important part in his life and in the development of his 
ideas during the next few years. And it is true that this 
exuberance of friendliness is in some sort a reaction from 
the loneliness that went before. 

There is no doubt about Mill’s isolation in his early 
years, though there is no evidence of any sense of loneliness 


* Edinburgh Review, Vol. 139, Jan. 1874, pp. 117-118, 


Some Important Friendships 23 


until along about the time of the mental crisis. It was not 
till then that he realized that there was something he might 
have which he had not. But the picture we get of Mill’s 
early days is of a precocious and self-opinionated little boy, 
much more at home arguing with grown people than in the 
companionship of others of his own age. In later years Mill 
realized the gaps in his early education. He said to Caroline 
Fox, “I never was a boy; never played at cricket. It is 
better to let Nature have her own way.”* Francis Place 
was visiting Bentham at Ford Abbey in 1817 while the Mills 
were there. In August he wrote his wife: 

“John is truly a prodigy, a most wonderful fellow; and when 
his Logic, his Languages, his Mathematics, his Philosophy, shall 
be combined with a general knowledge of mankind and the affairs 
of the world, he will be a truly astonishing man; but he will 
probably be morose and selfish. Mill sees this; and I am operating 
upon him, when the little time I can spare can be so applied, to 
counteract these propensities, so far as to give him a bias towards 
the management of his temper, and to produce an extensive con- 
sideration of the reasonings and habits of others, when the time 
shall come for him to observe and practise these things.” ° 


Between 1821 and 1826 (the years between fifteen and 
twenty in his own age) the period of his “‘youthful propa- 
gandism”’ his intimates were all older than himself. John 
Austin was thirty-seven in 1826, Grote, thirty-two the same 
year, Charles Austin, whom Mill looked upon as an “elder 
contemporary,” was twenty-seven, William Ellis was twenty- 
six, and George Graham and J. A. Roebuck were both 
twenty-five. 

The only member of the group younger than Mill was 
Eyton Tooke, who was born in 1808. Mill had a deep 
affection for “Tooke, which scarcely shows itself in the 
Autobiography. But in writing to d’Eichthal after Tooke’s 
suicide in 1830, Mill describes his sense of loss in terms which 


*Caroline Fox, Memories of Old Friends, p. 19. 
°Wallas, Life of Place, p. 136. 


24 Individualism Versus Individuality 


can be compared only with those he used in connection with 
Mrs. Mill’s death thirty years later: 


“Ce n’est pas l’intensité, c’est la durée d’un tel chagrin qui 
pése lourdement sur moi, et je le sens a l’énervement et presque a 
l’épuisement, pour le moment, de toute mon activité, de tout mon 
zéle pour l’humanité ou pour mes devoirs. I] me semble que je Nai 
jamais eu d’attachement que pour lui, que je n’ai jamais travaillé 
que pour gagner sa sympathie et son approbation. . . . Plus tendre- 
ment je chéris sa mémoire, plus ardemment je poursuivrai ces 
grands objets auxquels il attachait un intérét si profond. Je ferais 
peu de cas de la vie, ou de l’humanité, si je ne pensais quil y a 
dans le monde quelques hommes comme lui, et que tous one en 
eux-mémes la capacité de devenir, au moins quelque chose d’ap- 
prochant de ce qu’il était.” ° 


In the passage in the Autobiography about the mental 
crisis Mill speaks of his sense of friendlessness at that time: 


“I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. 
If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs 
a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. I felt, 
too, that mine was not an interesting, or in any way respectable 
distress. There was nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, 
if I had known where to seek it, would have been most precious. 
The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my 
thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest 
hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been 
natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was 
the last person, to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. 
. .. . Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any 
hope of making my condition intelligible. It was however abund- 
antly intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon it, the more 
hopeless it appeared.” ? 





° Correspondence Inédite, p. 118. 
* Autobiography, p. 95. 
Is this the passage Mill was referring to? 
“Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain, 
And with some sweet oblivious antidote 
Cleanse the stuff’'d bosom of that perilous stuff 
Which weighs upon the heart?” . 
—Macheth, Act V, Scene 3. 


Some Important Friendships 25 


The earliest glimpses we get of Mill in his letters shows 
a young man pathetically reaching out for someone to be- 
friend him and understand. In 1829 he wrote to John Ster- 
ling, whom he knew only slightly at that time: 


“T am now chiefly anxious to explain to you, more clearly 
than I fear I did, what I meant when I spoke to you of the com- 
parative loneliness of my probable future lot. Do not suppose 
me to mean that I am conscious at present of any tendency to 
misanthropy—although among the very various states of mind, 
some of them extremely painful ones, through which I have passed 
during the last three years, something distantly approximating to 
misanthropy was one. At present I believe that my sympathies 
with society, which were never strong, are, on the whole, stronger 
than they ever were. By loneliness I mean the absence of that 
feeling which has accompanied me through the greater part of 
my life, that which one fellow-traveller, or one fellow-soldier has 
towards another—the feeling of being engaged in the pursuit of 
a common object, and of mutually cheering one another on, and 
helping one another in an arduous undertaking. This, which after 
all is one of the strongest ties of individual sympathy, is at present, 
so far as I am concerned, suspended at least, if not entirely broken 
off. There is now no human being (with whom I can associate on 
terms of equality) who acknowledges a common object with me, 
or with whom I can co-operate even in any practical undertaking, 
without the feeling that I am only using a man, whose purposes 
are different, as an instrument for the furtherance of my own.” ° 


A little later (March, 1833) he tried to pour his heart 
to Thomas Carlyle, and to make clear his sense of the barrier 
that was set between himself and other people: 


“You wonder at ‘the boundless capacity man has of loving’; 
boundless indeed it is in some natures, immeasurable and inex- 
haustible; but I also wonder, judging from myself, at the limit- 
edness and even narrowness of that capacity in others. That seems 
to me the only really insuperable calamity in life—the only one 
which is not conquerable by the power of a strong will. It seems 
the eternal barrier between man and man—the natural and im- 
passable limit both to the happiness and to the spiritual perfection 
of (I fear) a large majority of our race.” ® 


SJ. S. Mill, Letters, Vol. I. p. 2. 
®jJ. S. Mill, Letters, Vol, I. p. 37. 


26 Individualism Versus Individuality 


The intimacy with Carlyle lasted for a few years, but be- 
fore long the essential differences in the outlook of the two 
men asserted itself, and they drifted apart. 

With Sterling it was different. Though Sterling was 
away from England much of the time and Mill and he 
saw little of each other after the days of the Speculative 
Debating Society, there was a deep affection between them, 
and they kept up a correspondence which lasted until Ster- 
ling’s death in 1844. “He was indeed,” says Mill in his 
Autobiography, “one of the most lovable of men.” And in 
1842, in a letter to Archdeacon Hare, Mill speaks of Ster- 
ling’s discouragement at not being able to do any writing, 
and then says: 


“It is hard for an active mind like his to reconcile itself to 
comparative idleness, and to what he considers uselessness, only, 
however, from his inability to persuade himself of the good which 
his society, his correspondence, and the very existence of such 
a man diffuses through the world. If he did but know the moral 
and even intellectual influence which he exercises, without writing 
or publishing anything, he would think it quite worth living for, 
even if he were never to be capable of writing again.” ” 


Another friendship important at this time was that with 
Gustave d’Eichthal. It was in the spring of 1828, the year 
after the close of the “mental crisis,” that at a meeting of 
the London Debating Society Mill first met this attractive 
and winning protagonist of a new way of thought across 
the Channel. Open-minded as he was toward all new things, 
he became immediately interested in the gospel of the Saint- 
Simonians. Their plans for organizing industry under lead- 
ers skillful and at the same time altruistic seemed to Mill 
full of possibilities. And though he had no very high opinion 
of the machinery of their organization, in his letters to 
d’Eichthal he followed the custom of the Saint-Simonians 
and sent extravagant messages of homage to “Pierre Enfan- 


*° Hare, Life of Sterling, Vol. I. exciv. 


Some Important Friendships ry 


tin.” It was through d’Eichthal that Mill heard of Auguste 
Comte, who had been a member of the Saint-Simonian 
Group, and Saint-Simon’s secretary from 1818 to 1820. 
Mill read Comte’s Traite de Politique Positive, which had 
appeared in 1822, and was much impressed by the Saint- 
Simonians’ theory of alternate constructive and destructive 
epochs in history there propounded. The Saint-Simonians 
believed that the universal law was the law of development. 
They went to some pains to prove that each age had some- 
thing to contribute toward human progress. The Middle 
Ages, in spite of many defects, they saw to have been a 
constructive period. The 18th Century saw only the abuses 
of the system that had grown up, and tried to throw the 
whole thing overboard. The men of the 18th Century tried 
to set up as a positive guiding ideal certain negative princi- 
ples such as equality and liberty, which had been the basis 
of their revolt. It remained for the 19th Century to find 
the real basis of social organization, which the Saint-Simon- 
ians thought lay in the recognition of the fact that men had 
different capacities, and that the governing should be done 
by those who had skill and experience in governing. Mill 
felt the Saint-Simonians were kindred spirits. For d’Eichthal 
especially he had a warm affection. D’Eichthal for his part 
bears witness to the chaleur d’ame et veritable tendresse 
which he found in the young philosopher. ” 

The political and economic theories of the Saint-Simon- 
ians were an important factor in making Mill realize the 
shortcomings of the “common doctrine of the Liberals.”’ In 
his Autobiography Mill says: 

“Tt was partly by their writings that my eyes were opened to 
the very limited and temporary value of the old political economy, 
which assumes private property and inheritance as indefeasible 


facts, and freedom of production and exchange as the dernier mot 
of social improvement. The scheme gradually unfolded by the 


12 Correspondence Inédite, p. 1x. 


28 Individualism Versus Individuality 


Saint-Simonians, under which the labour and capital of society 
would be managed for the general account of the community, every 
individual being required to take a share of labour, either as 
thinker, teacher, artist, or producer, all being classed according 
to their work, appeared to me a far superior description of Social- 
ism to Owen’s. Their aim seemed to me desirable and rational, 
however their means might be inefficacious; and though I neither 
believed in the practicability, nor in the beneficial operation of 
their social machinery, I felt that the proclamation of such an 
ideal of human society could not but tend to give a beneficial 
direction to the efforts of others to bring society, as at present 
constituted, nearer to some ideal standard.” ” 

He adds that he honored them most of all for their 
position on the question of women and the family. 

But there were to Mill’s mind many objections to the 
teachings of the Saint-Simonians. He objects, among other 
things, to their doctrine of an organized spiritual power: 

“Un état dans lequel la massue du peuple, c’est-a-dire les 
illettrés aura pour l’autorité des savants, en morale et en politique, 
les mémes sentiments de déférence et de soumission qu’elle a actu- 
ellement pour les doctes en sciences physiques.” * 


Spirit, on the contrary, Mill claimed, is a thing which 
cannot be organized; it is a matter of the influence—de 
Vesprit sur l'esprit.™ 

Gustave d’Eichthal, in his apostolic zeal, had hopes of 
making converts of Mill and Eyton Tooke, and starting 
Saint-Simonism on a triumphant career in England. But he 
was doomed to disappointment. It is clear from Mill’s side 
of the correspondence that while he had a great personal 
liking for d’Eichthal and a great interest in the Saint-Simon- 
ians, he never would have identified himself with the Saint- 
Simonian School. It was, after all, a sect, and he was firm 
in his resolve to steer clear of any kind of sectarianism. In 
answer to a very zealous letter from d’Eichthal written in 


© Autobiography, p. 166-167. 
8 Correspondence Inédite, p. 18. 
* Correspondence Inédite, p. 11. 


Some Important Friendships 29 


1830, soon after the death of Tooke, in which d’Eichthal 
said that he was thinking of coming to London in the hope 
that a conversation face to face would convert Mill to the 
new Christianity, Mill replies most characteristically. If 
he ever were to be converted to Saint-Simonism, he says, 
it would not be the result of a sudden and rapid conviction 
produced by a few days or even a few weeks of discussion, 
but the fruit of his own reflection and study. He has little 
use for the kind of argument when each person desires only 
to bring the other to his own way of thinking. It is only 
when each is willing to give as well as to take that discussion 
is worth while. 


‘ 


“Aussi,” he says, “je suis enclin a refuser toute controverse 
orale avec vous, méme si vous etiez ici, nous risquerions seulement 
d’y voir s’alterer ou s’affaiblir nos sentiments actuels réciproques, 
car nous nous trouverions probablement respectivement plus intrait- 
ables que nous ne pensons, tout homme se montrant dans la dis- 
cussion pire qu’il n’est en réalité; appelé a défendre subitement 
ses opinions, il y semble inféode plus que de raison, et il est enclin 
a produire des arguments autres que ceux qui ont réellement agi 
sur son propre esprit.” * 


Mill seems to have felt, even if at this time he did not 
realize it, the inconsistency between d’Eichthal’s winning 
personality and the sort of mechanical regimentation 
which was involved in the Saint-Simonian philosophy. He 
knew there was something wrong about it all, but he had 
not yet discovered just what it was. Doubtless it was partly 
for this reason that he refused to discuss the matter with 
d’Eichthal. It was not until he read the later works of 
Comte many years afterward, that he saw explicitly the kind 
of thing that the Saint-Simonian philosophy could lead to. 

Mill continued to keep in touch with d’Eichthal and 
his friends through their ups and downs during the next 
few years by correspondence and through the columns of 


* Correspondence Inédite, p. 25. 


30 «= Individualism Versus Individuality 


the Globe. But there was little more that he could learn 
from them. ‘The case was different, however, with another 
French philosopher, better known in our time, who had 
been one of Saint-Simon’s followers, but had separated him- 
self from the latter early in his career. This was Auguste 
Comte. Comte’s Positive Politics had made a profound im- 
pression on Mill in 1825. After that time Mill had lost 
sight of the French philosopher until the appearance of the 
first two volumes of the Course de Philosophie Positive in 
1837. And during the next ten years the two men kept up 
an active correspondence. Comte’s influence on Mill was 
greater than one would be led to suppose from his Auto- 
biography and the Westminster Review articles on Comte, 
which Mill wrote after the publication of the Systéme de 
Politique Positive in 1851 and after the two men had drifted 
apart. In the Autobiography Mill describes at some length 
Comte’s influence on the Logic.** But perhaps the most 
marked effect that Comte’s philosophy had on Mill’s thinking 
was negative. Comte’s dogmatism and insistence on authority 
irked the liberty-loving Mill. The disagreements in matters 
of philosophy which led to the dropping of their correspond- 
ence with each other might have been foreseen in the light 
of the different temperaments of the two men. Mill was 
at bottom a liberal, brought up in the tradition of English 
individualism. Comte, on the other hand, had the Catholic 
Church for his background. He admired its system and 
order, and the authority that it exercised. His positive reli- 
gion which Mill characterized an evidence of the ‘‘melan- 
choly decadence of a great intellect’ was a sort of caricature 
of Catholicism, Mill was always open-minded, interested 
in political affairs and social progress. Comte, on the other 
hand, in order to leave himself free for his higher specula- 
tions, made a point of not keeping up with current affairs 


*% Autobiography, p. 147. 


Some Important Friendships 31 


or current philosophical thought. He practised what he called 
hygiene cérébrale. The contrast between Mill in later years 
in Parliament almost against his wishes, and Comte ineffectu- 
ally demanding the honor due to the high priest of positivism, 
symbolizes the difference between the characters of the two 
men. 

The actual points of divergence between them are in line 
with their differences in temperament. The first was on the 
matter of psychology. Comte rejected not only the association 
psychology which was so dear to Mill’s heart, but all psychol- 
ogy based on introspection, and substituted for it phrenology. 
Another matter of dispute was the position of women. 
Comte insisted women were men’s inferiors intellectually, 
though he thought them superior on the emotional side. Mill 
believed that the differences between men and women could 
be largely explained by outward circumstances and claimed 
for them equal opportunities with men, though he did admit 
the possibilities of certain innate differences. But the chief 
difference between them had to do with the fundamental 
conception of liberty and authority. Comte clung to his early 
theory of alternating critical and organic periods in the 
world’s history. The essential thing about organic periods 
was the unified organization of society under some central 
authority. This was true of the Middle Ages and was 
to be true of the positive era which Comte saw dawning. 
The critical periods were, to Comte’s way of thinking, 
purely negative. Criticism had no place in an organic period. 
He saw nothing of permanent value in the ideas of the 
French Revolution. Mill, on the other hand, believed that 
criticism was an important social function all the time. 
Comte’s ideas on government and on education Mill viewed 
with particular horror. He says that nothing can exceed 
Comte’s 


“combined detestation and contempt for government by assemblies 
and for parliamentary or representative institutions in any form. 


32. «Individualism Versus Individuality 


They are an expedient, in his opinion, only suited to a state of 
transition, and even that nowhere but in England. The attempt 
to naturalize them in France, or any Continental nation, he regards 
as mischievous quackery. Louis Napoleon’s usurpation is absolved, 
is made laudable to him, because it overthrew a representative 
government. Election of superiors by inferiors, except as a revolu- 
tionary expedient, is an abomination in his sight.” ” 


Comte thought that all education should be centralized 
under the spiritual power, and confined to practical matters: 

“Tt is no exaggeration to say that M. Comte gradually acquired 
a real hatred for scientific and all purely intellectual pursuits, 
and was bent on retaining no more of them than was strictly 
indispensable. The greatest of his anxieties is lest people should 
reason and seek to know more than enough. He regards all abstrac- 
tion and all reasoning as morally dangerous by developing an 
inordinate pride (orgueil), and still more, by producing dryness 
(sécheresse). Abstract thought, he says, is not a wholesome occu- 
pation for more than a small number of human beings, nor of 
them for more than a small part of their time.” ™ 


Students should be taught 
“not only without encouraging, but stifling as much as possible, 
the examining and questioning spirit. The disposition which should 
be encouraged is that of receiving all on the authority of the 
teacher.” * 

Mill’s distaste for Comte’s regimentation of affairs served 
only to bind him more closely to his own conviction of the 
importance of individuality and variety, and of freedom for 
people to think their own thoughts and live their own lives. 
In the Politique Positive particularly, Mill saw a despotism 
which would put an end to freedom—-political, intellectual, 
and spiritual—once and for all. ““Comte’s book,” Mill says, 
“stands a monumental warning to thinkers on society and 
politics, of what happens when once men lose sight, in their 
speculations, of the value of Liberty and of Individuality.” ” 


“ The Positive Philosophy of August Comte, p. 140. 
% The Positive Philosophy of August Comte, p. 160. 
® The Positive Philosophy of August Comte, p. 161. 

*° Autobiography, p. 149. 


Some Important Friendships 33 


Mill’s early enthusiasm for Comte on account of his 
scientific method contrasted with his later criticism of Comte, 
illustrates very clearly a point that will be brought out in 
the next chapter—that is, the shift which took place in 
Mill’s interest from “‘science,” so called, to warmer and more 
human interests. Mill’s friendships between 1825 and 1840 
brought into his life a new richness, and many new things 
to think about. His friendships made him realize the under- 
lying ties of affection and sympathy that could bind people 
together. But he realized, too, the importance of contrasts 
in social life. He saw that unless each person had some 
special contribution to make, social life would lose that 
very richness and diversity that make it valuable. As time 
went on, this matter of the development of the individual 
seemed to Mill more and more important. 


UYh; 


This was brought home to him and tremendously re- 
enforced in Mill’s own experience by what he calls the “most 
important friendship” of his life—that with Harriet Hardy 
Taylor, whom he afterward married. ‘Though Mill was 
influenced by the romantic movement on the continent, his 
own philosophy was the opposite of romantic. The emphasis 
was on the intellect—cold, detached, and analytical. But there 
is a warmth in his very enthusiasm for clear thinking and 
general principles, which suggests a personal romanticism in 
sharp contrast with his philosophical rationalism. It was this 
personal attitude which found its extreme expression in the 
case of Mrs. Taylor. 

The familiar story of the friendship between Mrs. Tay- 
lor and Mill, leading to their marriage in 1851, need not be 
recounted. But the episode was important in many ways. 
For one thing, it accounts for his withdrawing more and 
more from society as he did after the publication of the 


34 Individualism Versus Individuality 


Logic in 1843, and for the peculiar sensitiveness which he 
displays about his personal affairs. There was a good deal of 
disapproval on the part of Mill’s friends on the score of his 
intimacy with Mrs. Taylor. His father blamed him for being 
in love with another man’s wife. A coldness sprang up be- 
tween him and his mother and sisters due to a fancied slight 
of Mrs. Taylor—it seems that they did not call on her the 
day after Mill announced his intended marriage, as he 
thought they should have done. Mrs. Grote stopped seeing 
Mill apparently for this reason, and Roebuck says that a 
remonstrance which he made to Mill on the matter of his 
relations with Mrs. Taylor led to the cessation of their 
friendship.“ Mill’s preference for Mrs. Taylor’s company 
to Carlyle’s was one cause of the drifting apart of Mill and 
Carlyle. It may be inferred that Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. 
Carlyle did not get along very well together. Carlyle writes 
of these years: 

“Mill was another steady visitor (had by this time introduced 
his Mrs. Taylor, too,—a very will-o’-wispish “iridescence” of a 
creature; meaning nothing bad either). She at first considered my 
Jane a rustic spirit fit for rather tutoring and whirling about 
when the humor took her, but got taught better (to her lasting 
memory) before long.” ” 

On account of his admiration for Mrs. Taylor, Mill 
felt to an almost morbid degree the pressure of the adverse 
opinion of his friends. It was an experience calculated to 
make him feel more strongly than ever how important it is 
for the individual to be free to lead his or her own life 
as he or she sees fit, without interference from the rest of 
society. The distinction he makes in the Essay on Liberty 
between matters of importance to the individual himself and 
matters of more general social importance is ever in his 
mind. Of his relation to Mrs. Taylor, Mill says “we did not 


* Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 163. See also “Notes on the Private Life 
of John Stuart Mill” in Volume I of the Letters. 
* Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, p. 256. 


Some Important Friendships 35 


consider the ordinances of society binding on a subject so 
entirely personal.” * 

As to Mrs. Mill’s influence on her husband on the 
intellectual side, there will always remain a good deal of 
uncertainty. Mill’s own estimate of her intellectual ability 
is so extravagantly eulogistic that if it had come from a less 
considerable person it would have little weight. He compares 
her to Shelley, but says that “in thought and intellect, Shel- 
ley, so far as his powers were developed in his short life, 
was but a child compared with what she ultimately be- 
came.” “ Her memory was to him “a religion,” and every 
reference to her is in an exalted tone. She seemed the em- 
bodiment of wisdom: 

“As during life she continually detected, before any one else 
had seemed to perceive them, those changes of times and circum- 
stances which ten or twelve years later became subjects of general 
remark; so I venture to prophesy, that, if mankind continued to 
improve, their spiritual history for ages to come will be the 


progressive working-out of her thoughts, and realization of her 
conceptions.” *° 


Bain considers the suggestion that she might have been 
simply a clever and attractive woman who gave him back his 
own ideas, but points out that Mill always liked opposition 
in conversation, and expresses the opinion that their inter- 
course could not have been as deep and lasting as it was sim- 
ply on that basis.“ As for Mill’s own estimate of her influ- 
ence on himself, he felt that his best work was in the field of 
abstract principles, and that what she added was a common 
sense opinion about application. 

“Her mind invested all ideas in a concrete shape, and formed 


to itself a conception of how they would actually work; and her 
knowledge of the existing feelings and conduct of mankind was 


*8 Autobiography, p. 161. 

** Autobiography, p. 131. 

*© Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. III. p. 94. 
76 Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 173. 


36 = Individualism Versus Individuality 


so seldom at fault that the weak point in any unworkable sugges- 
tion seldom escaped her.” 


When he first met Mrs. Taylor, Mill was at the height 
of his reaction from the early utilitarian kind of individual- 
ism. The attractive and clever young woman, with the 
atmosphere of Fox’s radicalism about her, gave new value 
and impetus to his faith in liberty and democracy, a faith 
which had for a time been pushed into the background by 
the pressure of the new and interesting opinions of Coleridge 
and Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians. Mill says: 


“There was a moment in my mental progress when I might 
easily have fallen into a tendency towards over-government, both 
social and political; as there was also a moment when, by reaction 
from a contrary excess, I might have become a less thorough 
radical and democrat than I am. In both these points, as in many 
others, she benefited me as much by keeping me right where I 
was right, as by leading me to new truths and ridding me of 
errors. My great readiness and eagerness to learn from everybody, 
and to make room in my opinions for every new acquisition by 
adjusting the old and the new to one another, might, but for her 
steadying influence, have seduced me into modifying my early 
opinions too much.’ * 

These years of expanding interests and new friendships 
thus taught Mill the joy of friendly discussion with people 
of different points of view, and the exhilaration of the sense 
of a growing personality, making part of itself new experi- 
ences, and new interpretations of experience. Specifically 
they taught Mill two things. In the first place they made 
him realize how far down into human nature go the roots 
of friendship, and sympathy, and fellow feeling. They made 
him see how superficial was the older utilitarian analysis of 
unselfishness as a sort of enlightened selfishness, a thing built 
up in some artificial way from instincts in themselves dis- 
ruptive. In Utilitarianism Mill points out that “moral asso- 
ciations which are wholly of artificial creation, when intel- 


* Autobiography, p. 176. 
*8 Autobiography, p. 177. 


Some Important Friendships a7 


lectual culture goes on, yield by degrees to the dissolving 
force of analysis.’’ So unless they “harmonize” with a ‘“‘pow- 
erful class of sentiments,” these associations will not give a 
firm foundation for morality. “But,” he goes on to say, there 
is a “basis of powerful natural sentiment.” 


“This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; 
the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is 
already a powerful principle in human nature. . . . The social 
state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that 
except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary 
abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a mem- 
ber of a body.” ” 


The foundations of morality are not to be built up out of 
pure or “‘artificial’’ associations, but rest somehow in the 
structure of things. The world is of such a sort that it will 
support the identification by association of one’s own good 
with the good of others. 

In the Essay on Sedgwick, Mill says of the moral feel- 
ings: 


“It is not pretended that they are factitious and artificial asso- 
ciations, inculcated by parents and teachers purposely to further 
certain social ends, and no more congenial to our natural feelings 
than the contrary associations. The idea of the pain of another 
is naturally painful; the idea of the pleasure of another is natur- 
ally pleasurable. From this fact in our natural constitution, all 
our affections, both of love and aversion towards human beings, 
insofar as they are different from those we entertain towards 
mere inanimate objects which are pleasant or disagreeable to us, 
are held, by the best teachers of the theory of utility, to originate. 
In this, the unselfish part of our nature, lies a foundation, even 
independently of inculcation from without, for the generation of 
moral feelings.” °° 


In the second place this broadening out of his own social 
experience made him realize how different real “society” 
was from that strange abstraction, compounded of identical 


” Utilitarianism, p. 9. 
°° Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I. p. 163. 


38 «= Individualism Versus Individuality 


atoms,—the individuals—which his father and Jeremy Bent- 
ham and the rest had discoursed about. His friendships with 
people of many different sorts, his contacts with new points 
of view, brought home to him the fact of the uniqueness of 
each personality. He was beginning to see that much that 
was interesting and important was to be discovered along 
the path of the realization of people’s differences, as well 
as by the emphasis of their similarities. And as far as Mill’s 
own personality was concerned, these new friendships and 
this growing realization of the importance of individuality 
was providing for him a new interest in life, and was making 
him forget, by degrees, the bleak days of the mental crisis. 


Chapter IV. 
The Internal Culture of the Individual. 


I, 


In the years around 1840 we find Mull beginning to 
narrow the circle of his friendships and to withdraw more 
and more from public life. It was about this time that he 
decided that “society was at best an insipid affair” and began 
to devote himself more and more to Mrs. Taylor and to his 
literary work. The disapproval of his family and friends in 
the matter of his increasing intimacy with Mrs. Taylor, as 
recounted in the last chapter, was one cause for this. But 
there was, nevertheless, behind Mill’s withdrawal from 
social life a very real conviction on his part of the import- 
ance of his own literary work and of the danger of wasting 
too much time in the general run of social affairs. He wrote 
Mazzini in 1858: 

“IT sympathize too strongly both with your taste for solitude 
and with the devotion of your time and activity to the great object 
of your life, to intrude on you with visits or invitations. We, like 
you, feel that those who would either make their lives useful to 
noble ends, or maintain any elevation of character within them- 
selves, must in these days have little to do with what is called 
society. But if it can be any pleasure to you to exchange ideas with 
people who have many thoughts and feelings in common with 
you, my wife and I reckon you among the few persons to whom 
we can sincerely say that they may feel sure of being welcome.” * 


Another cause for his withdrawal is to be found in his 


1 Letters, Vol. I. p. 201. 


40 Individualism Versus Individuality 


disappointment at the failure of the reform party to follow 
up the success of the Reform Bill of 1832. This re-enforced 
his conviction of the mediocrity of the average individual of 
his day. But Mill’s reaction to this situation was not only 
negative. On the contrary the commonplaceness of people, 
whether in “society” or politics, made him feel all the more 
strongly the importance of making a conscious effort to de- 
velop some individuals here and there out of this mediocrity. 
His emphasis on “‘self culture’? was very definitely directed 
toward this end. 

In that part of Caroline Fox’s Memories which has to 
do with these years there are some interesting passages about 
Mill. His brother, Henry Mill, who was dying of tubercu- 
losis, had been taken to Falmouth early in 1840 in the hope 
that the sea air would be of help to him. John Stuart Mill 
came down at frequent intervals to be with his family. John 
Sterling was there much of the time. They were often at 
the Fox’s and had long conversations on politics and philoso- 
phy and religion which Caroline Fox recounts. She quotes 
Mill as saying: 

“Avoid all that you prove by experience or intuition to be 
wrong, and you are safe; especially avoid the servile imitation 
of any other, be true to yourself, find out your individuality, and 
live and act in the circle around it. Follow with earnestness the 
path into which it impels you, taking reason for your safety-lamp 
and perpetually warring with inclination; then you will attain 
to that freedom which results only from obedience to right and 
reason, and that happiness which proves to be such, on retrospec- 
tion. Every one has a part to perform whilst stationed here, and 
he must strive with enthusiasm to perform it. Every advance 
brings its own particular snares, either exciting to ambition or 
display, but in the darkest passages of human existence a pole 
star may be discovered, if earnestly sought after, which will 
guide the wanderer into the effulgence of light and truth. What 
there is in us that appears evil is, if thoroughly examined, either 
disproportioned or misdirected good, for our Maker has stamped 
his own image on everything that lives.” 


She concludes: 


The Internal Culture Al 


“Oh! how much there was this evening of poetry, of truth, 
of beauty! but I have given no idea of it on paper, though it has 
left its own idea engraven on my memory.’ * 

Allowance must be made for Caroline Fox’s somewhat 
sentimental and moralistic editorship, but whatever Mill 
said, her impression of emphasis on the importance of in- 
dividual development is significant. She gives in full a letter 
from Mill to Barclay in which Mill says: 

“But there is only one plain rule of life eternally binding, and 
independent of all variations in creeds, and in the interpretation of 
creeds, embracing equally the greatest moralities and the smallest; 
it is this: try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing 
thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances 
being both duly considered, and then DO IT.’ *® 

Writing later of Muill’s development, she speaks of an- 
other letter from Mill to Barclay in which Mill ‘speaks of 
his growing conviction that individual regeneration must pre- 
cede social progress, and in the meantime he feels that the 
best work he can do is to perfect his book on Logic, so as to 
aid in giving solidity and definiteness to the workings of 
others.”’ She quotes a statement by Sterling who said of Mill: 

“He has made the sacrifice of being the undoubted leader of 
a powerful party for the higher glory of being a private in the 
army of Truth, ready to storm any of the strong places of False- 
hood, even if defended by his late adherents. He was brought 
up in the belief that politics and social institutions were every- 
thing, but he has been gradually delivered from this outwardness, 


and feels now clearly that individual reform must be the ground- 
work of social progress.’ * 


AE 


Sterling’s remark about Mill’s realization of the inade- 
quacies of politics and government is penetrating. It points 
again to the shift that took place in Mill’s interests, which 


* Caroline Fox, p. 17. 
® Caroline Fox, p. 20. 
* Caroline Fox, p. 35. 


42 Individualism Versus Individuality 


was seen in the last chapter in connection with Mill’s later 
reaction to Auguste Comte. This development in MiAill’s 
thought is one from an attempt to formulate a science of 
human nature in the sense which James Mill and Jeremy 
Bentham conceived it, an affair of general laws, quantitative 
and uniform, to a realization of the importance of those 
human values which cannot’ be weighed and measured and 
made part of a simple and comprehensive scientific system. 
Mill was beginning to see that the mechanical view of human 
nature in which he had been brought up was not adequate 
to explain human nature as it really is, with its joys and 
sorrows, its hopes and aspirations, its loves and hates, its 
strivings and successes and failures. And as time went on, 
this human side of human nature seemed to him more and 
more to be important. He was becoming more and more 
interested in individual differences, in concrete individuals, 
and in the unique contributions that individual personalities 
could make to the social whole. 

But on the other hand, there were certain limitations 
which stood in the way of Mill’s complete acceptance of all 
that this type of individualistic philosophy implies. The first 
of these was a matter of temperament. In spite of Goethe’s 
motto and Mill’s resolution to steer clear of any kind of 
sectarianism, Mill was after all by nature a protagonist of a 
certain point of view. He was at his best when he was in 
the thick of the philosophical fray—not when he was stand- 
ing on an emotional mountain top, viewing the battle from 
afar. His conviction of the importance of giving every side 
of every question a fair hearing in the interest of ultimate 
truth did not prevent him from earnestly defending his own 
particular philosophical position, and as earnestly denounc- 
ing those with whom he disagreed, as, for example, Hamilton 
and the other representatives of the intuitionalist school. 
And in spite of his theoretical emphasis on the value of the 
interplay of individuality, the friends of whom he saw less and 


The Internal Culture 43 


less as time went on were those who, like Carlyle and d’Eich- 
thal and Roebuck and Comte, had a point of view fundamen- 
tally different from his own, and those whom he saw in- 
creasingly more of were men like Bain and Chadwick and 
Thornton, whose intellectual position—economical, political, 
social, and philosophical—was much the same as his. 

This same temperamental limitation can be seen in Mill’s 
intercourse with foreigners. With all his interest in things 
French and his visits to the continent, he was, and remained, 
essentially an Englishman. He was willing to admit in the 
abstract that ways of doing things other than English ways 
are more fitting in lands other than England, and his denun- 
ciations of British life were frequent and vociferous. But 
after all the standards by which he judged were the customs 
of his own land. He had the typical British disdain for other 
national cultures. The emphasis on individuality throughout 
his writings might have led to that sort of internationalism 
which stresses the special contributions of different races as 
they go to make up a rich and varied and complex world 
culture, but we look in vain for this point of view in Muill’s 
writings on international affairs. 

Another limitation is to be found in the fact that Mill 
was not, after all, a man of very catholic experience. His first 
hand knowledge of life was pretty closely confined to that 
particular stratum of English society to which he belonged. 
He did not know a great deal at first hand about the actual 
lives of the laboring people. He had not known in his own 
experience, as Francis Place, for instance, knew, the misery 
and suffering that could be caused by the industrial situation 
in his day. An unpublished journal of his trip to the lake 
country in 1831 contains an account of his contact with some 
of the industrial towns in the northern part of England, but 
Mill’s interest in the working people, and his plans for their 
improvement, were based more on books and statistics and 
poor law reports than on what he saw and heard for himself. 


44. Individualism Versus Individuality 


And on the other hand, he had almost no contact with 
the English aristocracy. He knew few of them intimately, 
and almost never went into their homes. Writing to Sterling 
in 1831 he says: 

“If there were but a few dozens of persons safe (whom you 
and I could select) to be missionaries of the great truths in which 
alone there is any well-being for mankind individually or collect- 
ively, I should not care though a revolution were to exterminate 
every person in Great Britain and Ireland who has £500 a year. 


Many very amiable persons would perish, but what is the world 
the better for such amiable persons?” ® 


Later on, to be sure, we find him speaking of an educated 
aristocracy as the chief protection from the mediocratizing 
tendencies of democracy. But this again was a theoretic 
check, and he had in mind not the aristocracy as they were, 
but an ideal aristocracy made up of men of leisure devoted 
to art and letters and government. 

Another and more specific limitation was Mill’s funda- 
mental loyalty to the association psychology. We can find 
no fault with Mill for continuing to work away at the 
science of human nature. For the purpose of prediction and 
control we have to analyze phenomena into simple units and 
view the observed behaviour of things in terms of quantita- 
tive laws as simple as possible. The trouble with this “scien- 
tific” approach both in Mill’s day and in our own, is that 
it tends, whether consciously or unconsciously on the part 
of its advocates, to go over into the position that the “scien- 
tific” aspect of human nature is the only aspect that is “real.” 
The differences which just because they are differences can- 
not be brought into a generalized scheme of things—the 
uniquenesses—all those things that make personality what 
it is—come to be discounted. This was the thing that Mill 
discovered; hence the increasing emphasis on individuality 
in his writings. 


5 Letters, Vol. I. p. 15. 


The Internal Culture 45 


But at the same time his interest in clear thinking and 
logical method remained. His discovery of the valuable differ- 
ences in individuals did not make him forget their valuable 
similarities. He was convinced that sound principles of 
morals and economics and social reform and government 
could be based only on sound philosophy. This was his funda- 
mental objection to the philosophy based on intuition. He 
says: 

“The notion that truths external to the mind may be known 
by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and 
experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual 
support of false doctrines and bad institutions. By the aid of this 
theory, every inveterate belief and every intense feeling, of which 
the origin is not remembered, is enabled to dispense with the 
obligation of justifying itself by reason, and is erected into its 
own all-sufficient voucher and justification. There never was such 
an instrument devised for consecrating all deep-seated prejudices.” ° 

This is all very well as far as it goes. As an instrument 
for understanding and guiding social processes, the philoso- 
phy based on intuition was little better than a collection of 
pious wishes. But when Mill tries to go ahead and develop 
a closely articulated social philosophy of his own, he begins 
to get into trouble. 

There were two causes of confusion in the specific way 
in which Mill developed his scientific approach to social 
problems: in the first place he insisted on clinging to the 
principles of the association psychology, and in the second 
place he tried to use general principles not only in the study 
of conditions as they actually exist, but also in an intellectual- 
istic fashion as rules for determining the path of social 
advance. Mill kept to the end his faith in the ultimate 
efficacy of the principles of the association psychology to 
give a satisfactory account of mental processes. His edition 
of his father’s Analysis vf the Human Mind published 
with elaborate notes in 1856 bears witness to this, It is to 


® Autobiography, p. 158. 


46 Individualism Versus Individuality 


his mind high praise when he writes of Herbert Spencer 
in 1864, “I have read through his Principles of Psychology 
which is as much better than I thought as the First Princi- 
ples are less good. .... He has great mastery over the 
obscurer applications of the associative principle.” ‘ 

This allegiance got him into various kinds of trouble. 
It explains for one thing why he never made much progress 
with a project that he had much at heart for many years, 
namely the development of the science of Ethology. Psychol- 
ogy, Mill says, “ascertains the simple laws of mind in 
general.” Ethology “traces their operations in complex com- 
binations of circumstances.” 

“Ethology stands to Psychology in a relation very similar to 
that in which the various branches of natural philosophy stand 
to mechanics. The principles of Ethology are properly the middle 
principles, the axiomata media (as Bacon would have said) of 
the science of mind, as distinguished, on the one hand, from the 
empirical laws resulting from simple observation, and on the 
other, from the highest generalizations.” * 

The empirical laws here referred to include among 
other things “aphorisms” from which at one time Miuill 
hoped to get much help. In his essay entitled 4 phorisms 
Mill points out that “there are two kinds of wisdom,” one 
kind dependent on long chains of reasoning, the other that 
“acquired by experience of life.” This unsystematic wisdom 
is embodied in aphorisms. That they are unsystematic is no 
argument against them, because ‘‘truths, each of which rests 
on its own independent evidence, may surely be exhibited 
in the same unconnected state in which they were discov- 
ered.” ‘“These detached truths are at once the materials and 
the tests of philosophy itself; since philosophy is not called 
in to prove them, but may very justly be required to account 
for them.” ® They are also, for practical purposes, the guides 


7 Letters, Vol. II. p. 7. 
8 Logic, p. 603. 
® Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I. p. 233. 


The Internal Culture 47 


of life. In the essay on Sedgwick he says: ‘Every one directs 
himself in morality, as in all his conduct, not by his own 
unaided foresight, but by the accumulated wisdom of all 
former ages embodied in traditional aphorisms.” ” 

But this does not mean that conduct should not be 
guided by systematic reason. “Moral doctrines,” he says, 
“fare no more to be received without evidence, nor to be sifted 
less carefully, than any other doctrines. An appeal lies, as 
on all other subjects, from a received opinion, however 
generally entertained, to the decisions of cultivated reason.” * 
This is where the* greatest happiness principle comes in. 
The importance of the principle lies precisely in this, that 
it gives us a standard whereby we can judge what maxims 
are good, and what are bad. Aphorisms were the immediate 
material from which the science of Ethology was to be con- 
structed. Aphorisms or maxims are the empirical rules which 
result from “simple observation.” Ethology was to have been 
the connecting link between the aphorisms (and similar con- 
clusions based on direct observation and the experience of 
man) and the greatest happiness principle. 

But Mill never made much progress with Ethology. 
In a letter to Bain written as late as 1859 he speaks about 
the latter’s forthcoming book on phrenology and on “the 
science of character,’ and says: 

“T expect to learn a good deal from it, and to be helped by 
it in anything I may hereafter write on Ethology—a subject I have 


long wished to take up, at least in the form of Essays, but have 
never yet felt myself sufficiently prepared.” ” 


But there is more than this to be said on Mill’s failure to 
get ahead with the new science. He failed because the 
construction of the science of Ethology, as he conceived of 
it, was an impossible undertaking. It was to have been based 


10 Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I. p. 172. 
4 Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I. p. 185. 
” Letters, Vol. I, p. 226. 


48 Individualism Versus Individuality 


on the general principles established by the association psy- 
chology, and it was impossible just because that psychology 
gave a faulty account of the working of men’s minds. 
Aphorisms and maxims and the like represent insights into 
different and unique types of situations. And the association 
psychology was not rich enough to systematize them without 
leaving out that about them which was distinctive. 

This difficulty with Ethology is closely linked up with 
the other cause of confusion above referred to, namely, that 
Mill, in one of his moods, kept trying to bring the whole 
business of living under a few general principles, going back 
to the greatest happiness principle itself. The first chapter 
of Utilitarianism as well as the last Book of the Logic, 
make it clear that Mill thought that it was essential to dis- 
cover some one principle to which all questions of the conduct 
of life could be referred. He states this very clearly at the 
end of the Logic: 


“There are not only first principles of Knowledge, but first 
principles of Conduct. There must be some standard by which 
to determine the goodness or badness, absolute and comparative, 
of ends, or objects of desire. And whatever that standard is, 
there can be but one; for if there were several ultimate principles 
of conduct, the same conduct might be approved by one of those 
principles and condemned by another; and there would be needed 
some more general principle, as umpire between them. 

“Accordingly, writers on Moral Philosophy have mostly felt 
the necessity not only of referring all rules of conduct, and all 
judgments of praise and blame, to principles, but of referring 
them to some one principle; some rule, or standard, with which 
all other rules of conduct were required to be consistent, and 
from which by ultimate consequence they could all be deduced. 
Those who have dispensed with the assumption of such a universal 
standard, have only been enabled to do so by supposing that a 
moral sense, or instinct, inherent in our constitution, informs us, 
both what principles of conduct we are bound to observe, and 
also in what order these should be subordinated to one another. 

“The theory of the foundations of morality is a subject which 
it would be out of place, in a work like this, to discuss at large, 
and which could not to any useful purpose be treated incidentally. 


The Internal Culture 49 


I shall content myself, therefore, with saying, that the doctrine 
of intuitive moral principles, even if true, would provide only 
for that portion of the field of conduct which is properly called 
moral. For the remainder of the practice of life some general 
principle, or standard must still be sought; and if that principle 
be rightly chosen, it will be found, I apprehend, to serve quite 
as well for the ultimate principle of Morality, as for that of 
Prudence, Policy, or Taste.” * 


The scheme that he suggests would place every depart- 
ment of human action under one of these three heads. 
Philosophy, from this point of view, was the Science of 
Life. There was, corresponding to this, an Art of Life, 
related to the Science of Life as any art is to the science 
which underlies it, that is by the fact that it states the find- 
ings of science not (as science does) according to their causes, 
but with reference to the purpose for which, in any particular 
connection, the discoveries of science are to be used. The 
Art of Life has ‘“‘three departments”’: 

“Morality, Prudence or Policy, and Aesthetics; the Right, the 
Expedient, and the Beautiful or Noble, in human conduct and 
works. To this art (which, in the main, is unfortunately still to be 
created), all other arts are subordinate; since its principles are 
those which must determine whether the special aim of any par- 
ticular art is worthy and desirable, and what is its place in the 
scale of desirable things. Every art is thus a joint result of laws 


of nature disclosed by science, and of the general principles of 
what has been called Teleology, or the Doctrine of Ends.” ** 


And yet at other times Mill saw clearly enough that 
there was a certain incommensurability among values. His 
famous admission of qualitative distinction between pleas- 
ures, damaging as it was to his own system, is an indication 
of this. His classification of actions in the Essay on Bentham 
into their moral, aesthetic, and sympathetic aspects, while 
it points toward the later attempt at systematization suggest- 
ed in the foregoing quotation from the Logic, shows, never- 


8 Logic, pp. 657-8. 
“ Logic, p. 657. 


500s Individualism Versus Individuality 


theless, that Mill had a lively sense of the difficulties in- 
volved in any such classification. A somewhat different 
attempt at organizing this material into a coherent system 
leads Mill to a distinction which is to be found in several 
places in his writings between the ‘Province of Duty” and 
the “Province of Free Virtue.” 

In Utilitarianism we read: 


“It is the business of ethics to tell us what are our duties, or 
by what test we may know them; but no system of ethics requires 
that the sole motive of all we do shall be a feeling of duty; on the 
contrary, ninety-nine hundredths of all our actions are done from 
other motives, and rightly so done, if the rule of duty does not 
condemn them.” * 


A more explicit statement of this is to be found in the 
essay, “Thornton on Labour and Its Claims,” published in 
the Fortnightly Review of May, 1869: 


“Mr. Thornton seems to admit the general happiness as the 
criterion of social virtue, but not of positive duty—not of justice 
and injustice in the strict sense; and he imagines that it is in 
making a distinction between these two ideas that his doctrine 
differs from that of utilitarian moralists. But this is not the case. 
Utilitarian morality fully recognizes the distinction between the 
province of positive duty and that of virtue, but maintains that 
the standard and the rule of both is the general interest. From 
the utilitarian point of view, the distinction between them is the 
following:—There are many acts, and a still greater number of 
forbearances, the perpetual! practice of which by all is so necessary 
to the general well-being, that people must be held to it compul- 
sorily, either by law, or by social pressure. These acts and for- 
bearances constitute duty. Outside these bounds there is the innum- 
erable variety of modes in which the acts of human beings are 
either a cause, or a hindrance, of good to their fellow-creatures, 
but in regard to which it is, on the whole, for the general interest 
that they should be left free; being merely encouraged, by praise 
and honour, to the performance of such beneficial actions as are 
not sufficiently stimulated by benefits flowing from them to the 
agent himself. This larger sphere is that of Merit or Virtue.” * 


15 Utilitarianism, p. 17. 
16 Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. V. pp. 60-61. 


The Internal Culture 51 


In the Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, we find 
the same distinction. Mill says that the religion of humanity 


“makes the same ethical mistake as the theory of Calvinism, that 
every act in life should be done for the glory of God, and that 
whatever is not a duty is a sin. It does not perceive that between 
the region of duty and that of sin there is an intermediate space, 
the region of positive worthiness. It is not good that persons should 
be bound, by other people’s opinion, to do everything that they 
would deserve praise for doing. There is a standard of altruism 
to which all should be required to come up, and a degree beyond 
it which is not obligatory, but meritorious. It is incumbent on every 
one to restrain the pursuit of his personal objects within the 
limits consistent with the essential interests of others. What those 
limits are it is the province of ethical science to determine; and 
to keep all individuals and aggregations of individuals within 
them, is the proper ofhce of punishment and of moral blame. If in 
addition to fulfilling this obligation, persons make the good of 
others the direct object of disinterested exertions, postponing or 
sacrificing to it even innocent personal indulgences, they deserve 
gratitude and honor, and are fit objects of moral praise. So long 
as they are in no way compelled to this conduct by any external 
pressure, there cannot be too much of it; but a necessary condition 
is its spontaneity; since the notion of a happiness for all, procured 
by the self-sacrifice of each, if the abnegation is really felt to be a 
sacrifice, is a contradiction. Such spontaneity by no means excludes 
sympathetic encouragement; but the encouragement should take 
the form of making self-devotion pleasant, not that of making 
everything else painful.” ” 


If M. Comte had followed the guidance of Catholic 
ethics in this matter, Mill says, he would have done better: 


“We do not conceive life to be so rich in enjoyments that it 
can afford to forego the cultivation of all those which address 
themselves to what M. Comte terms the egotistic propensities. On 
the contrary, we believe that a sufficient gratification of these, 
short of excess, but up to the measure which renders the enjoyment 
greatest, is almost always favorable to the benevolent affections. 
The moralization of the personal enjoyments we deem to consist, 
not in reducing them to the smallest possible amount, but in 
cultivating the habitual wish to share them with others and with 
all others and scorning to desire anything for one’s self which 


“ Positive Philosophy of. duguste Comte, p. 129. 


52 Individualism Versus Individuality 


is incapable of being so shared. There is only one passion or 
inclination which is permanently incompatible with this condition— 
the love of domination, or superiority, for its own sake; which 
implies, and is grounded on, the equivalent depression of other 
people. As a rule of conduct, to be enforced by moral sanctions, 
we think no more should be attempted than to prevent people from 
doing harm to others, or omitting to do such good as they have 
undertaken.” * 

Mill had come to realize that there were limits within 
which the “science” of human nature must be confined, 
and that most of the important values of life are to be found 


along the path of individual development. 


L1Ty 


So much then for Mill’s explicit attempts at a science of 
human nature. But these attempts, after all, make up a 
relatively small part of the total bulk of his writings. And 
when he writes from his heart about the social problems 
which he sees pressing upon the people of his day, the con- 
siderations on the basis of which he came to his conclusions 
are in the main somewhat different from the system of 
general principles which he gave when it came to rationaliz- 
ing. If, in studying that part of Mill’s work which has to 
do with social problems themselves, rather than with the 
logic of the social sciences, we forget about his familiar 
inherited principles and try to discover what were the under- 
lying ideas which seemed important to him, we find one 
central thought underlying most of his conclusions. This 
is the idea of personality as something growing from within 
and developing by intercourse with others. Mill, to be sure, 
did not talk about personality. Though he was coming to 
realize the importance of society in its effect on the individ- 
ual, he was a long way from the idea of the complete inter- 
dependence between the individual and the group, which is 


* Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, p. 131. 


The Internal Culture 53 


bound up with the word “personality” in present-day par- 
lance. But when Mill talked about “individuality” he had 
the germ of this conception in his mind. It will be worth 
while to analyze somewhat more closely just what Mill 
meant by individuality. 

In the first place it was closely connected with the 
interest in “‘self-culture’ that appeared after the mental 
crisis, Very soon Mill saw that the great mistake of the 
early utilitarians was their one-sided emphasis on the ex- 
ternals of moral theory. 

“T ceased,” he says, “to attach almost exclusive importance to 
the ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the 
human being for speculation and for action. I had now learnt by 
experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated 


as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and 
enriched as well as guided.” * 


“It is really important,” says Mill in another place, “not 
only what men do, but also what manner of men they are 
that do it.” ” One of Mill’s chief criticisms of Bentham was 
that he had nothing to say about the value of a conscious 
effort on the part of the individual toward self-cultivation. 
To Mill’s mind to leave this out was to leave out one-half 
of morality. “Morality consists of two parts. One of these 
is self-education.—That department is a blank in Bentham’s 
system.” ” In the Table of the Springs of Action, Bentham 
omits a whole series of what are real motives—sympathy, 
self-respect, the sense of honor, the love of beauty, the love 
of order, the love of power, and some more, all of which 
involve the recognition of important inner values. ~ These 
are the things which go to make up character. The early | 
Utilitarians in their desire to emphasize consequences over- 
looked the fact that certain habits, dispositions, ways of doing 


19 Autobiography, p. 100. 

° Liberty, p. 117. 

*1 Essay on Bentham, Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I. p. 388. 
2 Essay on Bentham, Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. 1. p. 384. 


54. Individualism Versus Individuality 


things, may be developed in individuals, which may be of 
great moral importance. This error was involved with their 
oversimplified doctrine of motive. John Stuart Mill never 
got quite clear on this, but at least he saw that there was 
a gap in Bentham’s system. And he felt the practical import- 
ance, not only from a moral point of view, but from the 
standpoint of the individual’s own happiness, of a conscious 
effort on the part of the individual to build up resources 
within himself. 

A practical objection to this doctrine of self-culture 
which presented itself to Mill’s mind was the principle of 
“necessity” as applied to the question of the freedom of the 
will. Behind the discussion of the freedom of the will in 
the Logic lies the desire to reconcile a conviction of the 
truth of the doctrine of necessity which his early upbringing 
and the doctrine of universal causality demanded, with his 
equally strong conviction of the importance to the individual 
of the sense of being able to shape his own character and 
mould his own destiny. Necessitarian as he is, he says: 

“The application of so improper a term as Necessity to the 
doctrine of cause and effect in the matter of human character, 
seems to me one of the most signal instances in philosophy of the 
abuse of terms, and its practical consequences one of the most 
striking examples of the power of language over our associations. 
The subject will never be generally understood until that objection- 
able term is dropped. The free-will doctrine, by keeping in view 
precisely that portion of the truth which the word Necessity puts 
out of sight, namely the power of the mind to co-operate in the 
formation of its own character, has given to its adherents a prac- 
tical feeling much nearer to the truth than has generally (I believe) 
existed in the minds of necessitarians. The latter may have had 
a stronger sense of the importance of what human beings can do 
to shape the characters of one another; but the free-will doctrine 


has, I believe, fostered in its supporters a much stronger spirit 
of self-culture.” * 


The individual must have a real conviction that self-cul- 


78 Logic, p. §85. 


The Internal Culture 55 


ture is both possible and worth while, if by self-culture in- 
dividuality is to be fostered and developed. 


Three other conceptions have an important connection 
in Mill’s mind with the idea of individuality. These are 
spontaneity, diversity, and competition. The influence of 
the philosophy of romanticism upon Mill, through Coleridge, 
Maurice, Sterling, and others, has been alluded to above. 
An integral part of this philosophy was the idea of the 
development of the individual as something that took place 
spontaneously, from within—a doctrine very different from 
anything in the philosophy of the early utilitarians. Mill 
was acquainted with the writings of Pestalozzi, whose experi- 
ments in education expressed and substantiated this view of 
the nature of the individual. 


Pestalozzi, under the influence of Rousseau, had come 
to the conclusion that education was not something that 
could be gotten only out of books, not primarily learning 
Greek and Latin,—the current doctrine since the Renais- 
sance—but came somehow from within the individual. His 
desire was to educate the whole man. He took a number 
of poor children into his home at Neuhof, and trained them 
on the farm and in the work shop. Education had to do with 
things, he thought, not with words. We should go from 
“things to words.” For him the center of interest was the 
child himself, not the things he was going to be taught, and 
the most important thing about the child was his own spon- 
taneous activity. In Pestalozzi (as later in Carlyle) we find 
the figure of the individual growing from within, like a 
plant or a tree. He says: “Teach me, summer day, that 
man, formed from the dust of the earth, grows and ripens 
like a plant, rooted in the soil.” Mill mentions Pestalozzi 
as a particularly important figure in the history of the 
development of the conception of the value of individual 
freedom. Pestalozzi’s conception of the self-activity of the 
individual, of the growth and development of the self from 


56 «Individualism Versus Individuality 


within, is almost the direct antithesis of Locke, Helvetius, 
and James Mill, and the conception of the mind as a tabula 
rasa. John Stuart Mill tells us that his father, when he 
was teaching, counted on the intelligibility of the abstract, 
presented by itself without the help of any concrete form. 
And it must be admitted that in the case of his son, his 
pedagogical theory was pretty well justified by its results. 
But the new viewpoint characteristic of Rousseau and Pesta- 
lozzi made a profound impression upon John Stuart Mill. 
In the essay on liberty in later years, Mill writes: 


“Human nature is not a machine,—but a tree, which requires 
to grow and develops itself on all sides, according to the tendency 
of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” ™* 


Writing of Mrs. Mill in the Autobiography he speaks of 
the “spontaneous tendency” of her faculties, “which could 
not receive an impression or an experience without making 
it the source or the occasion of an accession of wisdom.” 
He says, “Up to the time when I first saw her, her rich 
and powerful nature had chiefly unfolded itself according 
to the received type of feminine genius.” ” 

The idea of spontaneity, as a more definitely formulated 
scientific concept, was coming into importance in psychology 
about the time that Mill was working on these problems. 
Bain, in a chapter on “Spontaneous Activity and Feelings 
of Movement” in The Senses and the Intellect (published in 
1855), states that 


“movement precedes sensation, and is at the outset independent 
of any stimulus from without. . . . . Action is a more intimate 
and inseparable property of our constitution than any of our 
sensations, and in fact enters as a component part into every one 
of the senses, giving them the character of compounds while itself 
is a simple and elementary property.” ” 


*4 Liberty, p. 117. 
°° Autobiography, p. 130. 
*° Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, p. 59. 


The Internal Culture 57 


Among the arguments for this position he mentions the 
“exuberant activity of the young,” and says: 


“The activity of young animals in general, and of animals 
remarkable for their active endowments (as the insect tribe), 
may be cited as strongly favouring the hypothesis of spontaneity. 
When the kitten plays with a worsted ball, we always attribute 
the overflowing fullness of moving energy to the creature’s own 
inward stimulus, to which the ball merely serves for a pretext. 
So an active young hound, refreshed by sleep or kept in confine- 
ment, pants for being let loose, not because of anything that attracts 
his view or kindles up his ear, but because a rush of activity 
courses through his members, rendering him uneasy till the con- 
fined energy has found vent in a chase or a run.” ” 


A considerable part of Muill’s review of The Senses and 

the Intellect, which appeared in the Edinburgh for October, 
1859, is an exposition of the place of spontaneity. This con- 
tribution on Bain’s part Mill characterizes as ‘“‘the first 
capital improvement which Mr. Bain has made in the 
Association Psychology as left by his predecessors.” Bain, 
says Mill: 
“holds that the brain does not act solely in obedience to impulses, 
but is also a self-acting instrument; that the nervous influence 
which, being conveyed through the motory nerves, excites the 
muscles into action, is generated automatically in the brain itself, 
not, of course, lawlessly and without a cause, but under the organic 
stimulus of nutrition; and manifests itself in the general rush of 
bodily activity, which all healthy animals exhibit after food and 
repose, and in the random motions which we see constantly made 
without apparent end or purpose by infants. This doctrine, of 
which the accumulated proofs will be found in Mr. Bain’s first 
volume (pages 73 to 80), supplies him with a simple explanation 
of the origin of voluntary power.” ” 


And it supplies Mill with further evidence for the truth 
of the view of human nature on which his doctrine of indi- 


viduality was based. 
The second principle is that of diversity. Self-culture 


*7 Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, p. 68. 
*8 Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. IV. p. 125. 


58 Individualism Versus Individuality 


is valuable precisely because people are different from each 
other, and as a result of self-culture many new and inter- 
esting things will come to pass. Diversity is something to be 
fostered and encouraged. 

As a sort of text for the essay on liberty Mill quotes 
the following from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s The Sphere 
and Duties of Government; ‘The grand leading principle 
toward which every argument unfolded in these pages 
directly converges is the absolute and essential importance of 
human development in its richest diversity.” Later we 
find another quotation from Von Humboldt to the effect 
that for the development of personality there is required 
“freedom and variety in situations.” Thus diversity comes 
in in two ways. Mill recognized that as a matter of fact 
people are different from each other and that for the develop- 
ment of individuality there must be diversity also in their 
surroundings. But the two things go together. If individuality 
is recognized and fostered it will produce a social situation 
where there will be increasingly more scope for individu- 
ality. 

The admission that people differ among themselves is the 
important point. It is a radical departure from the doctrine 
of the early Utilitarians. However they may have acted 
in the every day relations of life, their philosophy was based 
on the hypothesis that the individuals who made up society 
could be regarded for all intents and purposes as being 
identical. But John Stuart Mill saw that this was by no 
means the whole truth. He says: 


“There is no reason that all human existence should be con- 
structed on some one or some small number of patterns. If a 
person possesses any tolerable amount of common sense and 
experience, his own mode of laying out his existence is the best, 
not because it is the best in itself, but because it is his own 
mode. Human beings are not like sheep; and even sheep are not 


9 Liberty, p. 116. 


The Internal Culture 59 


undistinguishably alike. A man cannot get a coat or a pair of 
boots to fit him unless they are either made to his measure, or 
he has a whole warehouseful to choose from: and is it easier 
to fit him with a life than with a coat, or are human beings more 
like one another in their whole physical and spiritual conforma- 
tion than in the shape of their feet?” °° 


People are different. It is only by recognizing and culti- 
vating their peculiar gifts on the part of individuals, that 
the most worthwhile social order may be achieved: 

“Tt is not by wearing down into uniformity all that is individual 
in themselves, but by cultivating it, and calling it forth, within 
the limits imposed by the rights and interests of others, that human 
beings become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation; and 
as the works partake the character of those who do them, by the 
same process human life also becomes rich, diversified, and ani- 
mating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and 
elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every 
individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth 
belonging to.” * 


Mill saw too the importance of variety in man’s environ- 
ment. His account of the oppression he felt during the 
mental crisis at the thought of the exhaustibility of the com- 
binations of musical tones shows the kind of thing he was 
reacting against. His love of natural scenery, and his fear 
lest with the growth of mechanical civilization the beauties 
of primitive nature would be crowded out, is another indi- 
cation of this same feeling.” If to James Mill uniformity 
was a cherished hypothesis, to John Stuart Mill it was a 
practical danger. 

The other important concept is that of competition. 
It is what Mill calls in one connection, the “principle of 
antagonism.” It is essential for individual development that 
there should be opposition to be overcome, conflicting opinions 
to be considered, competition with others and emulation 


8° Liberty, p. 125. 
31 Liberty, p. 120. 
82 Political Economy, Vol. II. p. 339; Letters, Vol. II, pp. 55, 56. 


60 Individualism Versus Individuality 


of others. The following, quoted by Mill from Von Hum- 
boldt, illustrates the idea that he has in mind: 

“Among men who are really free, every form of industry 
becomes more rapidly improved—all the arts flourish more grace- 
fully,—all sciences become more largely enriched and expanded. 
; . Among such men emulation naturally arises,” and (speaking 
of education), “tutors better befit themselves, when their fortunes 
depend upon their own efforts, than when their chances of promo- 
tion rest on what they are led to expect from the State.” ® 


Mill would not agree with the unbounded optimism that 
this statement reveals; but he would agree with it in prin- 
ciple. In economics, as we shall see, this points to competition 
in the technical sense and to economic liberalism; in polit- 
ical theory it lies behind Mill’s emphasis on the value of 
opposition between different political parties. And this 1s 
where liberty comes in. Without freedom of expression, 
freedom of development for different points of view and 
different ways of life, there would be no chance for that give 
and take which is such an important factor in increasing the 
variety and interest in human life, and so essential for the 
progressive development of individuality. 

This idea of the importance of developing individuality 
is the conception which lies behind all that Mill wrote on 
the social problems of his day. It represents a long step in 
advance of the formal individualism which characterized 
Mill’s teachers, and in behalf of which he himself started 
out to conquer the world. It is true that his interest in the 
formulation of scientific principles remained, but the interest 
in personality came first, and was the dominant factor in his 
philosophy. How this works itself out in his political econo- 
my, his philosophy of government, and his treatment of the 
more general problem of the limits of the authority of the 
social group over the individual, will be seen in the following 
chapters. 


83 Von Humboldt, Sphere and Duties of Government, p. 69. 


Chapter V. 


Individuality and Political Economy. 


Ne 


Mill’s Principles of Political Economy appeared in 1848. 
It was a very different kind of book from the works on 
political economy which had been written in the years 
preceding. In the first place it undertook to examine the 
philosophical foundation of the classical. political economy, 
particularly the status of the so-called economic laws. In the 
second place, as the subtitle of the work indicates, in addition 
to the “principles of political economy,” the work includes 
“some of their applications to Social Philosophy.” The polit- 
ical economists immediately preceding Mill had not thought 
very much about the problems involved in either of those 
points. They were so busy working political economy out on 
the model of mathematics that they did not concern them- 
selves much either with its foundations or its social implica- 
tions. Nassau Senior was typical. Gide and Rist say of him 
that he 
“removed from political economy every trace of system,* every 
suggestion of social reform, every connection with a moral or 
conscious order, reducing it to a number of essential, unchange- 
able principles. Four propositions seemed essential for this new 
Euclid, all necessary corollaries being easily deducible from one 
or other of these. Senior’s ambition was to make an exact science 


of it, and he deserves to be remembered as one of the founders 
of pure economics.” 


* In the sense of political or social program. 


62 Individualism Versus Individuality 


The four principles were: The Hedonistic Principle; 
The Principle of Population; The Law of Increasing Return 
in Industry; and The Law of Diminishing Return in 
Agriculture.* Gide and Rist over-simplify, perhaps, but in 
any case it is sufficiently clear that the main interest of this 
group of economists was on the theoretical side. They were 
so deeply interested in developing their economic theory that 
they simply failed to see the social implications which this 
theory involved. John Stuart Mill, on the other hand, had 
had for a long time a real concern for the people at the bot- 
tom of the social heap. In the debates with the Owenites, who 
regarded the “political economists” as “their most inveterate 
enemies,” * he must have learned a good deal, not only about 
the condition of the working people, but also about what 
they thought of the solutions which the political economists 
offered for their troubles. He was much impressed by the 
report of the Poor Law Commissioners in 1833, the condi- 
tion of the agricultural workers, and the lot of the Irish 
peasants. In addition to a real interest in economic theory 
for its own sake he wanted to make it an instrument for 
bettering these conditions. 

A particular fallacy into which the doctrines of the 
older political economists led them was the belief that their 
so-called ‘‘economic laws’ were laws of nature. Ruthless 
profiteering and the oppression of laboring people were de- 
fended as necessary results of the “natural law” of competi- 
tion. Clearly if these were “laws” that could not be modified, 
the plight of the common people was sad indeed. Economics 
might well be called the dismal science. But Mill saw that 
there was more to be said on this matter and that there was 
need for a closer analysis of the relation between “economic 
laws” and “‘natural law.” His solution of this problem, which 
is linked up with the whole of his philosophy of nature and 


1 Gide and Rist, History of Economic Doctrines, p. 350. 
* Autobiography, p. 87. 


Political Economy 63 


of the laws of nature, is of fundamental importance for the 
understanding of his political economy. In the Essay on 
Nature he says: 

“Nature means the sum of all phenomena, together with the 


causes which produce them, including not only all that happens, 
but all that is capable of happening.” ® 


But he goes on to say this definition ‘‘corresponds only to 
one of the senses of this ambiguous term.” It conflicts, for 
instance, with the common use of nature as opposed to art, 
and natural as opposed to artificial. Art, in this sense, is but 
a part of nature in its proper sense. “Art is but the employ- 
ment of the powers of nature for an end.”’* In all “artificial 
operations,” man’s part is a 


“very limited one; it consists in moving things into certain places. 
We move objects and, by doing this, bring some things into con- 
tact which were separate, or separate others which were in con- 
tact; and by this simple change of place, natural forces previously 
dormant are called into action, and produce the desired effect.” ° 


The injunction to “follow nature,” if it means anything, 
means simply to study nature and make use of the laws of 
nature: 


“Though we cannot emancipate ourselves from the laws of 
nature as a whole, we can escape from any particular law of 
nature, if we are able to withdraw ourselves from the circum- 
stances in which it acts. Though we can do nothing except through 
laws of nature, we can use one law to counteract another. Accord- 
ing to Bacon’s maxim, we can obey nature in such a manner as 
to command it. Every alteration of circumstances alters more or 
less the laws of nature under which we act; and by every choice 
which we make either of ends or of means, we place ourselves 
to a greater or less extent under one set of laws of nature instead 
of another.’ ° 


This passage throws light on the distinction in the Politi- 


® Three Essays on Religion, p. 5. 
* Three Essays on Religion, p. 7. 
®° Three Essays on Religion, p. 8. 
® Three Essays on Religion, p. 17. 


64 Individualism Versus Individuality 


cal Economy between production, a matter of natural laws, 
and distribution, which “depends on the laws and customs 
of society.”* In his Autobiography, in the passage in which 
he tells of the influence of Mrs. Mill, Mill speaks of what 
he considers the greatest contribution of the Political Econo- 
my. He says that it lies in 

“making the proper distinction between the laws of the Production 
of Wealth, which are real laws of nature, dependent on the 
properties of objects, and the modes of its Distribution, which, 
subject to certain conditions, depend on human will. The common 
run of political economists confuse these together, under the 
designation of economic laws, which they deem incapable of being 
defeated or modified by human effort; ascribing the same necessity 
to things dependent on the unchangeable conditions of our earthly 
existence, and to those which, being but the necessary consequences 
of particular social arrangements, are merely co-extensive with 
these.” * 


This was a sort of magna charta for the individual, 
hitherto governed inexorably by the iron law of wages, and 
other “laws” equally forbidding. For if the laws of distribu- 
tion could be ordered by men for their own well being, 
there was opened up a vast region of possibilities of relief 
and emancipation for that miserable multitude of men and 
women and children who found themselves at the bottom 
of the pile in the economic order of those days, and who 
thought, if they thought at all, that immutable economic 
laws compelled them to stay there. This distinction at the 
beginning of the Principles of Economics was, for those who 
had eyes to see it, a ray of hope in a dark land, over which 
the gloom of the dismal science brooded like the smoke 
from the factory chimneys over the city of Manchester. 
And the rest of the Principles is an effort to ascertain how, 
men being thus free, the laws of distribution can best be 
ordered for the well-being of mankind. 


7 Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 258. 
8 Autobiography, p. 174. 


Political Economy 65 


The foregoing makes it, perhaps, sufficiently clear that 
an important motive behind Mill’s work in Political Econo- 
my was humanitarian. It was social welfare that he was 
primarily interested in. But we can go further than that. 
A more detailed study of what Mill had to say about certain 
economic problems where social values are particularly im- 
portant, shows that the kind of social order Mill wanted 
was one in which individuality would be encouraged. This 
may be seen most clearly in relation to what Mill has to 
say about property, wages, and competition. Each of these 
has special bearing on his conception of the development of 
individuality. 


in & 


The champions of the classical political economy always 
assumed the principle of private property. For Bentham, 
security was the most important thing which the government 
had to provide for the well-being of the people, and security 
meant security of property. John Stuart Mill, however, was 
sufficiently emancipated from this tradition to be able to 
subject the principle of private property to a frank and 
thorough criticism. The institution of private property, as the 
institution on which the “economical arrangements of soci- 
ety” have almost universally rested, is discussed in Book II 
of the Political Economy. Though the production of wealth 
is governed by natural laws, “society can subject the distri- 
bution of wealth to whatever rule it thinks best,” ° and the 
ownership of property is a matter of distribution. The ques- 
tion is, what arrangement for the distribution of wealth is 
most desirable. The alternatives to a regime of private prop- 
erty which presented themselves to Mill’s mind were the 
various varieties of Socialism which blossomed and faded 
during the first half of the nineteenth century. Mill had a 
chance to know something first hand of the experiments in 


® Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 259. 


66 Individualism Versus Individuality 


Socialism, communistic or not communistic, which were 
being tried in his day. His early debates with the Owenites 
and his acquaintance with Saint-Simonianism through Gus- 
tave d’Eichthal have been mentioned already. In his various 
trips to France he had seen and heard a good deal of the 
followers of Louis Blanc and Fourier. In the Political 
Economy he devotes considerable space to the exposition of 
the systems of these four men. He admits the truth of many 
of their objections to a private property regime, and goes 
so far as to say in a well-known passage: 


“Tf, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism 
with all its chances, and the present state of society with all its 
sufferings and injustices; if the institution of private property 
necessarily carried with it as a consequence that the produce of 
labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an 
inverse ratio to the labour—the largest portions to those who 
have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work 
is almost nominal, and so in a decreasing scale, the remuneration 
dwindles as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until 
the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with 
certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life; if this, 
or Communism, were the alternatives, all the difficulties, great 
or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance.” ” 


But Communism must be compared not with the regime 
of individual property as it is, but as it might be. The success 
of Communism would depend on two conditions, “universal 
education” and ‘due limitation of the numbers of the com- 
munity.” And under these conditions, most of the evils of 
which communists complain would be done away, even if 
we retained our present social institutions. 

Mill’s defense of private property as against socialism 
centers about two points—the value from the point of view 
of individuality of the ownership of property, and the value 
of competition. In his discussion of private property Mill 
goes back to a conception of a right of private property rem- 


20 Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 267. 


Political Economy 67 


iniscent of Locke. Locke’s social and political philosophy 
was based on the idea of the law of nature; he goes back 
to a conception of man living in a state of nature and 
having certain “natural rights.’ The first of them is 
the right to life and self-preservation, together with the 
right to food, drink, and the other essentials of human exist- 
ence. Next is the right of each to do as he pleases, as long 
as he does not interfere with the equal rights of others. 
Finally, there is the right of each to the fruits of his own 
labor. Whatever a man “removes out of the state that 
nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labor 
with, and joined to it something that is his own, and there- 
by makes it his property.” ~ So for Mill private property is 
“the guarantee to individuals of the fruits of their own 
labor and abstinence’: 

“Nothing is implied in property but the right of each to his 
(or her) own faculties, to what he can produce by them, and 
to whatever he can get for them in a fair market; together with 


his right to give this to any other person if he chooses, and the 
right of that other to receive and enjoy it.” ” 


From this principle follow two others. The first is free- 
dom of contract: 


“The right of each to what he has produced, implies a right 
to what has been produced by others, if obtained by their free 
consent; since the producers must either have given it from good 
will, or exchanged it for what they esteemed an equivalent, and 
to prevent them from doing so would be to infringe their rights 
of property in the product of their own industry.” * 


The second is the right of bequest, or gift after death. “ 
The government may limit property rights and regulate 
them in certain ways. Taxes, for defense against invasion by 
foreign powers and for such other government functions as 


4 Locke, Treatise on Civil Government, Chap. V. Sec. 27. 
® Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 281. 
8 Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 280. 
4 Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 281. 


68 Individualism Versus Individuality 


on other grounds are deemed proper, are admitted by all. 
The right of bequest, Mill thinks, should be limited. It 
enables people to accumulate large fortunes without working 
for them, and makes possible the endowment in perpetuity 
of institutions which are of no use to society. With regard 
to this second point, Mill thinks there should be some body 
in the State with power to judge of the value of the purpose 
for which endowments of long standing are used, and divert 
the money to other uses when it seems best.” With regard 
to the right of bequest to individuals, he says that the ability 
to give what belongs to you, even after death, is a necessary 
part of the right of property. He would not limit the right 
of bequest, but would limit the right of inheritance to a fixed 
sum for each individual. * 

Property in land is on a different basis from property in 
things which a person has produced: 


“The essential principle of property being to assure to all 
persons what they have produced by their labor and accumulated 
by their abstinence, this principle cannot apply to what is not 
the produce of labor, the raw material of the earth.” ” 


But property in land has many advantages. Though land 
itself is “not the produce of industry, most of its valuable 
qualities are so.” To induce people to work the land, 
whether it be farming or mining, or any of the other opera- 
tions by which natural products are made valuable by labor, 
it is necessary to give a certain security of possession, espe- 
cially when there is any considerable investment necessary. 

For the agricultural population, security in the possession 
of their land is a great advantage. It inculcates in them 
habits of thrift, industry, and foresightedness. Mill quotes 
Arthur Young: “It is the magic of property which turns 


15 Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. I. p. 58. 

% Political Economy, Vol. I. pp. 281, 288; Vol. II. p. 338. 
17 Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 291. 

18 Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 292. 


Political Economy 69 


sand into gold.” * The last half of Book Two of the Political 
Economy is a study of the different types of tenancy on the 
part of the agricultural population. Mill comes to the con- 
clusion that the people are happy and prosperous and well 
clothed and well fed just in proportion as they have security 
in possession of the land and a fair return for their labor. 
This, he thinks, can be best accomplished by peasant pro- 
prietorships, or, in some cases, by the Metayer System, where 
the tenant and the landlord divide the produce in some 
pre-arranged proportion. 

You cannot speak of private property in land as you can 
of private property in other things. A person may have 
certain property rights in land—as the right to till it, or 
to live on it—and at the same time the public might have 
other rights, as that to walk across it. Mill speaks of the 
opinion that “land ought not to be private property, but 
should belong to the State,” and says that his opinion has 
always seemed to him “fundamentally just.” ” 

In 1873 Mill wrote a paper on the right of property 
in land for the Land Tenure Reform Association. It was 
the last thing he wrote before his death.” His position is 
substantially that of the Political Economy. The only 
justification for property in land is that it is an incentive 
to labor on land, which is necessary for the production of 


food. But: 


“when we know the reason of a thing, we know what ought to 
be its limits. The limits of the reason ought to be the limits of 
the thing. . . . . No rights to land should be recognized which do 
not act as a motive to the person who has power over it to make 
it as productive or otherwise as useful to mankind as possible.” ™ 


The conclusion is that the landlord should get from the 


® Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 254. 
°° Letters, Vol. II. p. 123. 
71 Letters, Vol. Il. p. 387. 
* Letters, Vol. II. p. 388. 


70 Individualism Versus Individuality 


land only such return as is brought about by his own im- 
provement of it: 
“Tf the nation at large have enhanced the value of the land 


independently of anything done either by landlord or tenant, that 
increase of value should belong to the nation.” ~ 


In judging the value of these principles which grow out 
of the “idea of private property” Mill’s interest in individu- 
ality has much weight. The deciding factor between com- 
munism and the private property regime is ‘“‘one considera- 
tion, viz., which of the two systems is consistent with the 
greatest amount of liberty and spontaneity.” 

“The perfection both of social arrangements and of practical 
morality would be, to secure to all persons complete independence 
and freedom of action, subject to no restriction but that of not 
doing injury to others; and the education which taught or the 
social institutions which required them to exchange the control 
of their own actions for any amount of comfort or affluence, or 
to renounce liberty for the sake of equality, would deprive them 
of one of the most elevated characteristics of human nature.” ™ 


For the development of personality, then, is needed a cer- 
tain amount of control over certain physical things. In his dis- 
cussion of private property Mill is not interested so much 
in defending the abstract right of private property, as in 
safeguarding private property as a means for the develop- 
ment of individual freedom. 


III. 


Another significant indication of Mill’s increasing regard 
for personality is his development of the doctrine of wages 
held by the economists who immediately precede him. The 
older economists regarded the laborer as a salesman whose 
commodity was his labor. Porter speaks of “The mere 


*3 Letters, Vol. II. p. 389. 
** Political Economy, Vol. I. p. 269. 


Political Economy 71 


laborer, who had nothing to bring to market but his limbs 
and his sinews.”* The result of this was (a) that wages 
were supposed to be determined simply by supply and de- 
mand, (b) that the laborer was supposed to have no interest 
in what he produced, after his day’s work was done and he 
had been paid for it, and (c) that high wages are supposed 
to increase the supply of labor (by increasing the birth rate) 
and conversely, just as high prices of commodities increase 
production. And owing to the confusion mentioned above 
about the meaning of natural law, there went with the 
more or less valid belief in the truth of this analysis of the 
situation as it then existed, the added and entirely gratuitous 
conviction that this state of affairs could never be changed. 

On the first of the three points mentioned above Ricardo 
says: 

“The market price of labor is the price which is really paid 
for it, from the natural operation of the proportion of the supply 
to the demand; labor is dear when it is scarce, and cheap when 
it is plentiful. . . . However much the market price of labor may 


deviate from the natural price, it has, like commodities, a tendency 
to conform to it.” ” 


With regard to the second point, the artificial separation 
of the workman from his labor, the following from James 
Mill is significant: 

“The laborer who receives wages sells his labor for a day, 
a week, a month, or a year, as the case may be.” 


The only difference, says the elder Mill, between a man 
who buys a slave and a man who employs labor is that one 
buys at one time 
“the whole of the labor which the man can ever perform: he 


who pays wages purchases only so much of a man’s labor as he 
can perform in a day or other stipulated time.” ” 


7° Quoted by Nicholson, Corn Laws, p. 96. 
*° Ricardo, Political Economy, p. 71. 
James Mill, Elements of Political Economy, pp. 21-22. 


72 Individualism Versus Individuality 


The third point—the matter of the relation between 
the number of the working population and wages, was taken 
very seriously, not only by his predecessors, but by John 
Stuart Mill himself. Ricardo says: 

“The natural price of labor is that price which is necessary to 


enable the laborers, one with ‘another, to subsist and perpetuate 
their race, without either increase or diminution.” 


And James Mill says: 


“If more workmen cannot be obtained—wages will be raised; 
which, giving an impulse to population, will increase the number 
of laborers.” ” 

This “natural price” of labor was admittedly an artificial 
figure, to be used simply for the purposes of analysis, and 
yet it tended to perpetuate certain misleading ideas. One of 
these was the assumption that the population was divided 
into fixed classes with a stationary standard of living. Ac- 
cording to this view, the only outlet for increased wages 
was for the workman to have a larger family. For a work- 
man to buy a piano or get out of the laboring class entirely 
was a thing undreamt of in the philosophy of these particular 
economists. And even if this assumption of fixed classes were 
true, the effect of wages on the size of a working man’s 
family would be an unimportant factor in the total wage 
situation, on account of the length of time necessary for this 
effect to take place. A thousand and one other factors would 
come in in the meantime. 

John Stuart Mill never completely freed himself from 
some of the misleading assumptions of these doctrines. His 
opposition to trade unions was based on his belief that the 
only hope for the working people was an increasing intelli- 
gence and foresightedness which would result in smaller 
families and a consequent reduction of the supply of labor. 
And yet he saw very clearly that the idea of a laborer as 


*8 Ricardo, Political Economy, p. 70. 
* James Mill, Elements of Political Economy, p. 25. 


Political Economy 73 


simply selling his work is incompatible with the development 
of personality. 

“To begin as hired labourers,” Mill says in the well- 
known chapter on the ‘‘Future of the Labouring Classes,” 
“then after a few years to work on their own account, and 
finally employ others, is the normal condition of labourers 
in a new country, rapidly increasing in wealth and popula- 
tion, like America or Australia.” “ Something of this sort is 
looked upon as their goal by the laboring population in older 
and more populous countries. The most practical plan for 
bringing this about is to Mill’s mind some form of co-opera- 
tive association. Of these there are two kinds. ‘The first is the 
situation where the employer shares his profits with the 
working people, generally by paying them a fixed wage, 
and giving them a certain share in the profits besides. Of 
the second kind Mill says: 

“The form of association, however, which if mankind continue 
to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not 
that which can exist between a capitalist as chief and working 
people without a voice in the management, but the association 
of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively own- 


ing the capital with which they carry on their operations, and 
working under managers elected and removable by themselves.” ™ 


By this means the working people can make a beginning 
toward the achievement of education, independence, and that 
real interest in their work which is essential to the fuller 
development of individuality. 


VG 


The question of the value of competition came up very 
definitely when Mill faced the Socialists’ indictment of the 
then existing economic order. The Socialist of that day had a 
strong case against competition. Mill states it and answers it 


°° Political Economy, Vol. II. p. 350. 
*2 Political Economy, Vol. II. pp. 357-358. 


74 Individualism Versus Individuality 


in his essay on Socialism, which was written in 1869 but 
not published till ten years after his death. Competition, 
according to the Socialist, is 

“srounded on opposition of interests, not harmony of interest, and 
under it every one is required to find his place by a struggle, by 
pushing others back or being pushed back by them. Socialists 
consider this system of private war (as it may be termed) between 
every one and every one, especially fatal in an economical point 
of view and in a moral. Morally considered, its evils are obvious. 
It is the parent of envy, hatred, and all uncharitableness; it makes 
every one the natural enemy of all others who cross his path, and 
every one’s path is constantly liable to be crossed. Under the 
present system, hardly any one can gain except by the loss or 
disappointment of one or of many others.” ” 


He quotes Louis Blanc’s Organisation du Travail to 
show that the effect of competition, coupled with a high 
birth rate on the part of the laboring population and the 
throwing of people out of work by machinery, is to reduce 
wages to the starvation point. When it comes to the middle 
classes, the tendency of competition is to concentrate business 
in the hands of a few monopolists. While goods may be 
cheap as long as competition lasts, when the monopolies come 
prices will go up. Even during the competition stage, compe- 
tition encourages dishonesty and adulteration. 

But Mill is not daunted by these objections. The advan- 
tages of competition to his mind clearly outweigh all the 
disadvantages. The Socialists, he says, see only one side of 
the matter. As far as wages are concerned, competition has 
as much of a tendency to keep wages up and prices down 
as to produce the contrary effect. This at least will be the 
case when the working people learn the importance of the 
limitation of the number of their offspring. The danger of 
monopoly, predicted by the Socialist, Mill thinks is not 
serious. Companies, such as railway companies, which have 
to carry on business on a “‘vast scale,” should be subject to 


82 Socialism, pp. 34-35. 


Political Economy 75 


regulation by the State. * The Socialists’ charge that compe- 
tition results in adulteration and an inferior quality of goods, 
Mill finds more difficult to answer. For a solution of this 
difficulty, Mill falls back on “laws against commercial 
fraud,” and the institution of co-operative stores. 

Then Mill turns his attention to the more important 
question, that of the relation between competition and char- 
acter. He says: 


“In the case of most men the only inducement which has been 
found sufficiently constant and unflagging to overcome the ever- 
present influence of indolence and love of ease, and induce men 
to apply themselves unrelaxingly to work for the most part in 
itself dull and unexciting, is the prospect of bettering their own 
economic condition and that of their family; and the closer the 
connection of every increase of exertion with a corresponding in- 
crease of its fruits, the more powerful is this motive. To suppose 
the contrary would be to imply that with men as they now are, 
duty and honor are more powerful principles of action than per- 
sonal interest, not solely as to special acts and forbearances respect- 
ing which those sentiments have been exceptionally cultivated, 
but in the regulation of their whole lives; which no one, I suppose, 
will affirm. It may be said that this inferior efficacy of public and 
social feelings is not inevitable—is the result of imperfect educa- 
tion. This I am quite ready to admit, and also that there are even 
now many individual exceptions to the general infirmity. But before 
these exceptions can grow into a majority, or even into a very 
large minority, much time will be required. The education of 
human beings is one of the most difficult of all arts, and this is 
one of the points in which it has hitherto been least successful; 
moreover improvements in general education are necessarily very 
gradual because the future generation is educated by the present, 
and the imperfections of the teachers set an invincible limit to 
the degree in which they can train their pupils to be better than 
themselves. We must therefore expect, unless we are operating 
upon a select portion of the population, that personal interest will 
for a long time be a more effective stimulus to the most vigorous 
and careful conduct of the industrial business of society than 
motives of a higher character.” ** * 


33 Socialism, p. 73. 54 Socialism, p. 100 ff. 
*In defending the doctrine that each individual is the only safe 


76 = Individualism Versus Individuality 


In somewhat the same spirit he writes in the Political 
Economy in the chapter on the “Probable Futurity of the 
Laboring Classes”’: 


“T do not pretend that there are no inconveniences in competi- 
tion, or that the moral objections urged against it by Socialist 
writers, as a source of jealousy and hostility among those engaged 
in the same occupation are altogether groundless. But if competi- 
tion has its evils, it prevents greater evils. . . . It is a common 
error of Socialists to overlook the natural indolence of mankind; 
their tendency to be passive, to be the slaves of habit, to persist 
indefinitely in a course once chosen. Let them once attain any state 
of existence which they consider tolerable, and the danger to be 
apprehended is that they will thenceforth stagnate; will not exert 
themselves to improve and by letting their faculties rust, will 
lose even the energy required to preserve them from deterioration. 
Competition may not be the best conceivable stimulus, but it is 
at present a necessary one, and no one can foresee the time when 
it will not be indispensable to progress. ... Instead of looking 
upon competition as the baneful and anti-social principle which 
it is held to be by the generality of Socialists, I conceive that, even 
in the present state of society and industry, every restriction of it 
is an evil, and every extension of it, even if for the time injuri- 
ously affecting some class of labourers, is always an ultimate good. 
To be protected against competition is to be protected in idleness, 





guardian of his own rights and interests in the essay on Representative 
Government he says that many people are fond of holding this doctrine 
“up to obloquy” as a “doctrine of universal selfishness.”” He then proceeds 
to turn their weapons against themselves in his best controversial style, 
“We may answer,” he says, “that whenever it ceases to be true that 
mankind, as a rule, prefer themselves to others, and those nearest to 
them to those more remote, from that moment Communism is not only 
practicable, but the only defensible form of society; and will, when that 
time arrives, be assuredly carried into effect. For my own part, not 
believing in universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that 
Communism would even now be practicable among the elite of mankind, 
and may become so among the rest. But as this opinion is anything 
but popular with those defenders of existing institutions who find fault 
with the doctrine of the general predominance of self-interest, I am inclined 
to think they do in reality believe that most men consider themselves before 
other people.”—Representative Government, pp. 208-209. 


Political Economy 77 


in mental dullness; to be saved the necessity of being as active 
and as intelligent as other people.” * 


But he goes on to point out that even if competition were 
not necessary as an incentive, it has other important advan- 
tages. Answering in another place an objection made by 
the communists, he says: 


“But even the dissensions which might be expected would be 
a far less evil to the prospects of humanity than a delusive unan- 
imity produced by the prostration of all individual opinions and 
wishes before the decree of the majority. The obstacles to human 
progression are always great, and require a concurrence of favor- 
able circumstances to overcome them; but an indispensable condi- 
tion of their being overcome, is that human nature should have 
freedom to expand spontaneously in various directions, both in 
thought and practice; that people should both think for them- 
selves and try experiments for themselves, and should not resign 
into the hands of rulers, whether acting in the name of a few 
or of the majority, the business of thinking for them, and of pre- 
scribing how they shall act. But in Communist associations private 
life would be brought in a most unexampled degree within the 
dominion of public authority, and there would be less scope for 
the development of individual character and individual prefer- 
ences than has hitherto existed among the full citizens of any state 
belonging to the progressive branches of the human family.” * 


Mill makes it clear that his interest in competition is 
due at least in part to the fact that he regards it as an instru- 
ment of self-culture. It is not for him an abstract principle 
of value apart from its results. In the essay on “Thornton on 
the Claims of Labor,” Mill criticizes Thornton on just this 
point. Thornton maintains that laborers have a right 
to combine against employers to force wages up; he seems 
to say that anything that results from this is what it should 
be, because you can’t go behind the “right” of competition. 
Mill takes particular pleasure in pointing out that this 
is just the kind of a predicament you get yourself in if you 


®° Political Economy, Vol. II. pp. 379-380. 
8° Socialism, pp. 116-117. 


78 Individualism Versus Individuality 


try to base a theory of conduct on rights, and not on utility. “ 

An interesting distinction between fair and unfair com- 
petition comes out in a letter written by Mill in 1865 to 
the Secretary of the Co-operative Plate-Lock Manufactory 
at Wolverhampton. Such co-operative plans for industrial 
organization seemed to him on the whole the best solution 
of the problem connected with the relations of capital and 
labor. He devoted a good deal of space to this matter in the 
Political Economy and came to be known as a good friend 
of co-operative enterprises. The Plate-Lock Makers had been 
carrying on a hard fight against a combination of private 
employers who were systematically trying to undersell them 
and put them out of business, and had appealed to Mill, 
among others, for financial help. He says: 


“Sir: I beg to enclose a subscription of £10 to aid as far as 
such a sum can do it, in the struggle which the Co-operative Plate- 
Lock Makers of Wolverhampton are maintaining against unfair 
competition on the part of the masters in the trade. Against fair 
competition I have no desire to shield them. Co-operative produc- 
tion carried on by persons whose hearts are in the cause, and 
who are capable of the energy and self-denial always necessary 
in its early stages, ought to be able to hold its ground against 
private establishments—and persons who have not those qualities 
had better not attempt it. But to carry on business at a loss in 
order to ruin competitors is not fair competition. In such a contest, 
if prolonged, the competitors who have the smallest means, though 
they may have every other element of success, must necessarily 
be crushed through no fault of their own. Having the strongest 
sympathy with your vigorous attempt to make head against what 
in such a case may justly be called the tyranny of capital, I beg 
you to send me a dozen copies of your printed appeal, to assist 
me in making the case known to such persons as it may interest 
in your favour.” * 


The point here is that competition is for a purpose—that 


is, to encourage industry, originality, activity, resourcefulness. 


87 Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. V. pp. 69-70. 
88 Letters, Vol. II. p. 21. 


Political Economy 79 


The combination against the Plate-Lock Manufacturers was 
unfair precisely because it brought in a factor—the money 
back of the private interests—which, in the end, would 
result in monopoly, and make competition impossible. 

This same point may be illustrated by Mill’s attitude 
to slavery. He was an undying foe of this institution. He saw 
in the doing away with slavery by Great Britain in all parts 
of the Empire in 1833, at a cost of £20,000,000, a particularly 
splendid act. He was one of a very few upper-class English- 
men who stood out for the North at the time of the Ameri- 
can Civil War. It was Mill’s faith in competition as a means 
of developing that initiative and self-reliance which seemed to 
him so important, that determined his attitude in this matter 
also. It is significant that Mill makes almost no use of the 
hardships and sufferings of the slaves as an argument against 
slavery. He was a good deal of an ascetic himself, and 
whether for himself or for others he cared much more for 
the things which fostered education, individual development, 
liberty, than for mere material prosperity and physical well- 
being. In a review of Professor Cairnes’ book, The Slave 
Power,” Mill summarizes the evils resulting from slavery. 
Slave labor is suited only to certain kinds of industries, 
namely, those in which a large amount of supervision is 
possible. It is reluctant, unskillful, and “wanting in versa- 
tility.” Because it is hard to teach the slaves to do more 
than one kind of thing, there is no attempt at rotation of 
crops, and the soil becomes exhausted. Its effect on the upper 
classes is bad. They become despotic and self-willed, they 
become indolent and lazy; and this, coupled with the fact 
that a large amount of capital is required to run a planta- 
tion profitably means that they get into debt. Two things 
are typical of industry carried on by slaves, “the magnitude 
of the plantations and the indebtedness of the planters.” 


°° Westminster Review, October, 1862; Dissertations and Discussions, 


Vol. III. p. 246 ff. 


80 Individualism Versus Individuality 


Another result of the tendency of the large planters to buy 
out the small, and the competition of negro slave labor with 
free white labor, is the arrival on the scene of ‘‘poor whites,” 
“white trash.” Another evil is that there is only one political 
party. “That variety of interests which springs from the 
individual impulses of a free population does not here exist.” ” 
Furthermore, slavery, as an economic institution, does not 
pay. It is so inefficient that wherever it is confined within a 
given territory, it works its own ruin. It can “be profitable 
for the slave holder only when there is virgin land to culti- 
vate, virgin timber to cut down, or when he can breed 
slaves to sell to slaveholders in new territories.” “ ‘The slave 
system seemed to Mill not only brutal and inhuman, but 
it afforded him an excellent example of the stagnation which 
is bound to result where the stimulus of competition is want- 
ing. 

From these considerations it may be seen that Mill 
thought that the value of competition for self-culture is two- 
fold. It provides an incentive for the individual to overcome 
his own inertia, and it makes possible that variety and 
diversity without which a full and interesting and worth- 
while life is not possible. It is only from the mutual opposi- 
tion and the interplay of different ways of doing things, 
different social customs, different points of view on practical 
matters of every-day life, on economic questions, on govern- 
ment, on philosophy, or on religion, that the best life for 
the individual and for society can be achieved. But for this 
sort of competition between different points of view the 
individual must be free within large limits to conduct his 
business in his own way, to manage his own property, to 
express his own opinions, and to live his own life. This brings 
us to the question of the ‘Limits of the Province of Govern- 


* Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. III. p. 275, quoted from Cairnes. 
“ Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. III. p. 283. 


Political Economy SI 


ment” which Mill discusses in the last book of the Political 
Economy, and opens up the whole matter of the individual 
and the liberty of the individual in relation to the political 
state, which is the subject of the next chapter. 


Chapter VI. 


Individuality and Government. 


LE 


Macvey Napier, editor of the supplement to the sixth 
edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for the writer of 
the articles on Government, Jurisprudence, Liberty of the 
Press, and some other subjects, selected one “James Mill, 
Esq., author of the History of British India.’ In 1828 these 
articles were reprinted and published in book form. They 
are written in James Mill’s most logical, lucid and condensed 
style, and give expression to the characteristic theories of 
the followers of Bentham. Coming from the camp of the 
enemy, they constituted a challenge that the Edinburgh Re- 
view could not resist, and in March, 1829, there appeared 
in that magazine a criticism of Mill’s essay on Government 
by Thomas Babington Macaulay. 

Macaulay directs his attack upon Mill’s method: 

“Tt is one of the principal tenets of the Utilitarians that senti- 
ment and eloquence serve only to impede the pursuit of truth. 
They therefore affect a quakerly plainness, or rather a cynical 
negligence and impurity, of style. The strongest arguments, when 
clothed in brilliant language, seem to them so much wordy non- 
sense. In the mean time they surrender their understandings, with 
a facility found in no other party, to the meanest and most abject 
sophism, provided those sophisms come before them disguised with 
the externals of demonstration. They do not seem to know that 
logic has its illusions as well as rhetoric,—that a fallacy may lurk 
in a syllogism as well as in a metaphor.” ? 


* Macaulay, Works, Vol. I. p. 389. 


Individuality and Government 83 


In keeping with this tradition, Macaulay says, Mill adopts 
the a priori method of reasoning. “He is an Aristotelian of 
the fifteenth century—born out of due season.” His assump- 
tions are two. The first is the greatest happiness principle— 
that the purpose of government is “‘to increase to the utmost 
the pleasures, and diminish to the utmost the pains, which 
men derive from each other.”” With this Macaulay substan- 
tially agrees. The second assumption is the self-interest of 
every individual. Despotism or monarchy are necessarily bad; 
despots being men, and men being selfish, despots will neces- 
sarily exploit the people. The only good government is a 
democracy, where the source of authority lies in the people 
themselves. This, Macaulay points out, simply isn’t true. 
There have been many good despots and many good kings. 
And there have been many bad democracies. 

There are some incidental points of interest which Ma- 
caulay makes with regard to James Mill’s political theory. 
He calls attention to the fact that under James Muill’s plan 
not the whole people, but the majority would govern; and 
if men were actuated by the selfish motives that Mill 
assumed, there would be nothing to prevent the majority 
from plundering the minority. This question came to be 
an important consideration in later years. Again, Macaulay 
says that to be consistent, Mill should allow not only all 
the men, but all the women to have votes. He quotes Mill: 

“One thing is pretty clear, that all those individuals whose 
interests are involved in those of other individuals, may be struck 
off without inconvenience. ... In this light women may be re- 


garded, the interest of almost all of whom is involved either in 
that of their fathers, or in that of their husbands.” 


What has happened to Muill’s self-interest principle? 


“Without adducing one fact, without taking the trouble to 
perplex the question by one sophism, he placidly dogmatizes away 
the interest of one-half the human race.” ? 


? Macaulay, Works, Vol. I. p. 407. 


84. Individualism Versus Individuality 


In view of the younger Mill’s later interest in the enfran- 
chisement of women, this has a truly prophetic ring. 

A particular point upon which he takes Mill up is his 
faulty analysis of human nature. Mill says men always act 
from “self interest.” Macaulay points out that this either 
means “that men, if they can; will do as they choose,” which 
is a truism and doesn’t get anywhere, or it means that men 
act from selfish motives, which is false. ‘“Ihe proposition 
ceases to be identical; but at the same time, it ceases to be 
true.” The whole argument of Mill’s essay is based on a 
shifting back and forth between these two meanings. It 
“consists of one simple trick of legerdemain.” * Elsewhere 
Mill admits that men do sometimes act for the good of 
others, owing to the “pains derived from the unfavorable 
sentiments of mankind.” On this premise, Macaulay works 
out a very pretty theorem “in the mathematical form in 
which Mr. Mill delights” proving that no rulers will do 
anything that will hurt the people, and proclaims his “evtpyxa”’ 
in Mill’s own words: ‘“The chain of inference, in this case, 
is close and strong to a most unusual degree.” * Macaulay’s 
conclusion is that “It is utterly impossible to deduce the 
science of government from the principles of human nature.” 
We cannot say whether the love of approbation is a stronger 
motive than the love of wealth even in our best friends. 
The only way progress can be made in the theory of govern- 
ment is to study the effect of particular motives on particular 
individuals, and adapt the government to the particular 
situation. * 


’ Macaulay, Works, Vol. I. pp. 415-416. 

*Macaulay, Works, Vol. I. p. 397. 

* An answer to Macaulay’s criticism appeared in an early number of 
the Westminster Review. Macaulay answered this in the Edinburgh 
Review of June, 1829. This was followed by another answer in the 
Westminster and a rejoinder by Macaulay in the October Edinburgh, but 
the arguments in the later stages of the controversy add little to what 
was brought out in Macaulay’s first essay. 


Individuality and Government 85 


II. 


In the Autobiography John Stuart Mill bears witness 
to the effect of this controversy on his own political thinking. 
He saw that there was much truth in Macaulay’s criticism, 
and he was not satisfied with the way in which his father 
met it. In place of defending his article simply as an argu- 
ment for parliamentary reform, the elder Mill seemed to 
be satisfied with it as laying down the main lines for a 
complete philosophy of government and treated Macaulay’s 
criticism as “simply irrational.” ° This, says Mill, made him 
realize that there was “something more fundamentally 
erroneous’ in his father’s “conception of philosophical method 
as applicable to politics” than he had supposed. And he goes 
on to explain in some detail how this led him to the method 
of political science which he formulates in the Logic. 

‘There are, he says, four methods which have been used 
in the social sciences—the chemical, the geometrical, the 
physical, and the historical. “The chemical, or experimental 
method is represented by Macaulay. It is impossible in the 
social sciences because in this field it is impossible to obtain 
the simple and controllable conditions without which there 
can be no conclusive experiment. The geometrical, or abstract 
method, represented by James Mill, errs by oversimplifying. 
It assumes that one factor, such as fear, or self-interest, is 
the universal cause of social phenomena—and this is obviously 
not the case. The valid method is a combination of induction 
and deduction. This Mill calls the “physical”? or concrete 
deductive method. In Book III of the Logic he points out 
that there are three steps in the deductive method—direct 
induction, ratiocination, and verification. The concrete de- 
ductive method as applied to social science consists in 
finding out by deduction what results might be expected to 
be produced in given circumstances from the laws of human 


® Autobiography, p. 134. 


86 «Individualism Versus Individuality 


nature as we know them, and then verifying the conclusion 
by a comparison with actual situations: 

“The ground of confidence in any concrete deductive science 
is not the a priori reasoning itself, but the accordance between its 
results and those of observation a posteriori. Either of these 
processes, apart from the other, diminishes in value as the subject 
increases in complication, and this is in so rapid a ratio as soon 
to become entirely worthless; but the reliance to be placed in the 
concurrence of the two sorts of evidence, not only does not diminish 
in anything like the same proportion, but is not necessarily much 
diminished at all.” ° 


Political Economy is the outstanding example of a depart- 
ment of Social Science in which the concrete deductive 
method may be used. What people will do in certain eco- 
nomic situations may be deduced from a few simple laws 
of Political Economy, and if people are actually found, in 
real situations, to do as predicted, the laws are to that extent 
verified. 

This is the direct concrete deductive method. But, follow- 
ing a suggestion which he got from Auguste Comte, Mill 
points out that in dealing with the more complex social prob- 
lems the method must be used inversely. ‘This he calls the In- 
verse Deductive or ‘‘Historical’’ Method. It differs 
“from the more common form of the Deductive Method in this— 
that instead of arriving at its conclusions by general reasoning, 
and verifying them by specific experience (as is the natural order 
in the deductive branches of physical science), it obtains its gener- 
alizations by a collation of specific experience, and verifies them 


by ascertaining whether they are such as would follow from known 
general principles.” ’ 


So much for Mill’s method. As for his conclusions on 
matters political he tells us in the Autobiography that after 
about 1830: 


“the only substantial changes of opinion that were yet to come, 
related to politics, and consisted, on one hand, in a greater approxi- 


® Logic, p. 620. 
7 Autobiography, p. 147. 


Individuality and Government 87 


mation, so far as regards the ultimate prospects of humanity, to 
a qualified Socialism, and on the other, a shifting of my political 
ideal from pure democracy, as commonly understood by its parti- 
sans, to the modified form of it, which is set forth in my Considera- 
tion on Representative Government.” * 


He suggests that this development in his “practical politi- 
cal creed” could be shown by comparing the first review of de 
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written in 1835, with 
the review of 1840, and with the essay on Representative 
Government. 

The first review of de Tocqueville appeared in the 
London Review for October, 1835. (Vol. 31 of the West- 
minster Review.) Miill’s interest is still in the machin- 
ery of government, and he recounts with a good deal of enthu- 
siasm de Tocqueville’s exposition of the workings of the 
various parts of the Constitution of the United States. The 
chief problem of democracy, as he sees it at this time, is to 
get the people to choose the right leaders. If they can do that, 
and then leave things in the leaders’ hands, all will be well. 
He says: 

“The idea of a rational democracy is, not that people them- 
selves govern, but that they have security for good government. 
This security they cannot have by other means than by retaining 
in their own hands the ultimate control. . . . Provided good 
intentions can be secured, the best government (need it be said?) 
must be the government of the wisest, and these must always be 
the few. The people ought to be the masters, but they are masters 
who must employ servants more skillful than themselves; like a 


ministry when they employ a military commander, or a military 
commander when he employs an army surgeon.” ® 


The two principal dangers of democracy, as de Tocque- 
ville sees them are, (1) that the best men will not be elected 
to office, and (2) that the rights of minorities will be 
abused by the majority in power. Neither of these dangers 


® Autobiography, p. 134. 
° Westminster Review, Vol. 31. p. 110. 


88 Individualism Versus Individuality 


seemed to Mill very serious at this time. The first defect he 
thinks is not inherent in democracy, but as far as America 
is concerned, is due to the fact that the American govern- 
ment has no serious problems to face, and great leadership 
is not called for. About the second objection, which later 
on seemed to him so important, he says, in the first place, 
that people in the United States all have so much the same 
interests that “it is not easy to see what sort of a minority 
it can be over which the majority can have any interest in 
tyrannizing.” ‘The only cases he can think of where there 
would be any great danger are in matters of race and relig- 
ion. The real danger is the danger of tyranny over opinion. 
A dead level of education and ideas is a state of things not 
at all desirable. And this seems to be the condition in Ameri- 
ca. No country, according to Mill, ‘has so few uninstructed 
persons, or fewer persons who are highly instructed.” * But 
there is a cure for this. “In the existence of a leisured class, 
we see the great salutary corrective of all the inconveniences 
to which democracy is liable.” * 

In the review which is reprinted in Dissertations and 
Discussions, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 
October, 1840, both these dangers seemed to Mull more 
formidable. De Tocqueville had pointed out that democracy 
is bound to come to grief in a country where, though there 
may be equality among the people, the people have not been 
trained to take an intelligent part in government and leave 
all the administrations in the hands of the central authority. 
This is the situation in France, according to de Tocqueville, 
where the people have so few political duties to perform that 
those which occasionally come their way are performed with 
little intelligence and interest. In the United States, on the 
other hand, so much of the actual administration of local 
affairs is in the hands of the people themselves, that they 


10 Westminster Review, Vol. 31. p. 118. 
4 Westminster Review, Vol. 31. p. 124. 


Individuality and Government 89 


keep themselves informed about political matters. Govern- 
ment is a real part of their lives. They can talk about politics 
fluently, and vote intelligently. Such, at least, was the Ameri- 
ca that de Tocqueville saw in 1830. 

This part of de Tocqueville’s book made more and 
more impression upon Mill as he thought more about it, 
and has more attention in the second review than in 
the first. The failure of the reform party to find a leader 
after their triumph of 1832, which he so bitterly laments 
in the Autobiography, brought this very near home. He 
was seeing more clearly all the time that the success of 
democracy depends after all not on theoretical checks to 
protect the people from being misgoverned by those whom 
they elect to rule over them (a consideration which had 
seemed very important before the Reform Bill), but on 
developing on the positive side, constructive leadership. So 
it was that training for democracy seemed more important 
in Mill’s eyes. And de Tocqueville’s picture of the New 
England local government, with its town meeting and wide 
distribution of local administrative powers, provided a valu- 
able clue. The arrangement for the administration of the 
English Poor Law, under the Poor Law Commissioners, 
where the actual administration was done locally and the 
central body acted only in an advisory capacity seemed to 
indicate that the same sort of arrangement, even if on a 
very much smaller scale, might work in England. 

As for the matter of the “tyranny of the majority,” 
while Mill still felt there was danger from this quarter, 
he did not make much progress in its solution until later on. 


III. 


It was with this background that Mill worked out the 
more complete political philosophy that we find in the Essay 
on Representative Government. The success of any type of 
government, he says, depends on the good qualities of the 


90 )= Individualism Versus Individuality 
governed, their “industry, integrity, justice, and prudence,” ” 
their willingness and ability to co-operate intelligently. The 
test of a good government is how far it tends to foster in 
the people these desirable qualities.” This is important not 
only because the well-being of the people is the sole object 
of government, but because these good qualities supply the 
motive power that makes the machinery go. A passage in 
Mill’s diary brings out this same point: 


“In government, perfect freedom of discussion in all its modes— 
speaking, writing, and printing—in law and in fact is the first 
requisite of good because the first condition of popular intelligence 
and mental progress. All else is secondary. A form of government 
is good chiefly in proportion to the security it affords for the 
possession of this. Therefore mixed governments, or those which 
set up several concurrent powers in the State, which are occasion- 
ally in conflict and never exactly identical in opinions and interests, 
and each of which is interested in protecting the opinions and 
demonstrations of opinions which the others dislike, are generally 
preferable to simple forms of government, or those which establish 
one power (though it be that of the majority) supreme over all 
the rest, and thence able, and probably inclined, to put down all 
the writing and speaking which thwarts its purposes.’ ™* 


This is the first element in a good government. The sec- 
ond has to do with the machinery itself—that is, how far it 
is “adapted to take advantage of the good qualities which 
may at any time exist, and make them instrumental to the 
right purposes.” » 

Democracy is the only form of government which can 
fulfill these two conditions. A despotism, no matter how good 
and how wise the despot, would be a bad form of govern- 
ment, because it would not develop the people: 


“A good despotism means a government in which, so far as 
depends on the despot, there is no positive oppression by officers 


% Representative Government, p. 187. 
*8 Representative Government, p. 193. 
** Letters, Vol. II. p. 379. 

® Representative Government, p. 193. 


Individuality and Government gI 


of state, but in which all the collective interests of the people are 
managed for them, all the thinking that has relation to collective 
interests done for them, and in which their minds are formed by, 
and consenting to, this abdication of their own energies. Leaving 
things to the Government, like leaving them to Providence, is 
synonymous with caring nothing about them, and accepting their 
results when disagreeable as visitations of Nature. With the 
exception, therefore, of a few studious men who take an intellect- 
ual interest in speculation for its own sake, the intelligence and 
sentiments of the whole people are given up to the material inter- 
ests, and when these are provided for, to the amusement and 
ornamentation of private life. But to say this is to say, if the whole 
testimony of history is worth anything, that the era of national 
decline has arrived; that is, if the nation had ever attained any- 
thing to decline from.” * 


Having established the fact that democracy is the type of 
government best adapted to foster and develop these ‘“‘good 
qualities’ in the governed, Mill comes back to the two 
dangers which he has discussed in the two earlier articles 
referred to above. On the problem of getting the best men 
elected to office, he has a good deal to say. His conclusion is 
that both in an aristocracy and in a democracy government 
will be by people not definitely trained to govern. Only in a 
bureaucracy do you achieve government by a class of men 
trained for this special end.” It must be admitted that a 
“bureaucratic government has, in some respects, greatly the 
advantage. It accumulates experience, acquires well-tried and 
well-considered traditional maxims, and makes provision for 
appropriate practical knowledge in those who have the 
actual conduct of affairs.” The trouble with this type of 
government is that there is no chance for originality, no 
chance to try new ways of doing things. ““The disease which 
afflicts bureaucratic governments, and which they usually 
die of, is routine.” And so democracy is to be preferred, 


16 Representative Government, p. 204. 
Representative Government, p. 246. 
18 Representative Government, p. 246. 


92 Individualism Versus Individuality 


even though there may be an apparent loss in efficiency. 
But this defect is not inherent in democracy. If the machinery 
of government is ordered aright, there is no reason why 
the best people available should not be elected to office. 

The second danger is that of the tyranny of the majority. 
. Macaulay, as has been pointed out above, saw this as a 
flaw in James Mill’s theory of democracy. De Tocqueville 
saw the practical danger in the United States. By the time 
that John Stuart Mill came to write the Essay on Repre- 
sentative Government he had become more convinced that 
there was real danger from this quarter. He points out a 
number of cases where it would be to the interest of the 
majority, at least to their immediate interest, to oppress the 
minority. It was at this point in the development of his 
thought that Mill came upon Hare’s scheme of propor- 
tional representation, which seemed to him at one stroke 
to solve this whole question, and to have numerous other 
beneficial effects. 

The “Pure idea of democracy,” Mill says, is the 
“sovernment of the whole people by the whole people, equally 
represented. Democracy as commonly conceived and hitherto prac- 
tised is the government of the whole people by a mere majority 
of the people, exclusively represented. The former is synonymous 
with the equality of all citizens; the latter, strangely confounded 
with it, is a government of privilege, in favour of the numerical 
majority, who alone possess practically any voice in the State. 
This is the inevitable consequence of the manner in which the 
votes are now taken, to the complete disfranchisement of minori- 
ties.” *° 

The cure of this abuse is a simple matter. It is to give 
minorities a representation in proportion to their numerical 
strength. The representatives of the minority will be out- 
voted when it comes to a show-down, but at least they will 
have an opportunity to be heard. 

This can be effected, Mill thinks, simply by a change 


™ Representative Government, p. 256. 


Individuality and Government 93 


“in the manner in which the votes are now taken.” The 
particular form in the manner of electing representatives 
which Mill advocated was “‘Mr. Hare’s Scheme.” This plan 
provided that: 

(1) “The unit of representation, the quota of electors 
who would be entitled to have a member to themselves” 
would be ascertained by dividing the number of voters by 
the seats in the House of Commons. 

(2) The votes would be cast locally, but any person 
could vote for any candidate, “in whatever part of the 
country he might offer himself.” 

(3) Under this arrangement it is clear that any given 
candidate might get either less or more than a sufficient 
number of votes to elect him. To provide for this each 
elector includes on his ballot second, third, fourth, etc., 
choices. If the candidate of his first choice gets too few 
votes to be elected, his vote goes to the candidate of his 
second choice. But the candidate of his first choice may 
receive more than enough votes to elect him. In this case 
“to obtain the full number of members required to complete 
the House, as well as to prevent very popular candidates 
from engrossing nearly all the suffrages,” the second choice 
would be counted on all those ballots over and above the 
minimum required for election. here are certain obvious 
imperfections in this scheme as here outlined, but these are 
taken care of by special provisions. 

This desire on Mill’s part to give minorities representa- 
tion is another example of his eagerness to provide everyone 
with opportunities for self-expression. Complete self-expres- 
sion cannot be had without representation in the field of 
government. Furthermore, minority representation is valu- 
able from the point of view of society. Mill would apply 
here what he said in the Liberty about the expression of 
unpopular opinions. They may be right, or they may be 
partly right; and even if they are wrong, the opposition they 


94. Individualism Versus Individuality 


provide will force the majority to be more critical about 
their own position. So Mr. Hare’s plan has several advan- 
tages. For one thing, it would force the party in power 
to put up better candidates. ““The majority would insist on 
having a candidate worthy of their choice, or they would 
carry their votes somewhere else, and the minority would 
prevail.” ® For another thing, if the minority opinion could 
be presented by a strong champion in the legislature, it 
would have more chance of being understood and justly 
estimated ; “the opposing ranks would meet face to face and 
hand to hand, and there would be a fair comparison of their 
intellectual strength in the presence of the country.” “ The 
minority representatives in the assembly would be “the ap- 
propriate organ of a great social function,” namely, the 
“function of Antagonism.” ” A certain amount of conflict 
within a community is essential if it is to continue progres- 
sive. History shows this. When in the case of rival powers 
in history “the victory on either side was so complete as to 
put an end to the strife, and no other conflict took its place, 
first stagnation followed, and then decay.” * 

Another scheme that Mill advocates is that of giving 
certain individuals a plurality of votes. The qualification for 
this would be on the basis of education. And as there is no 
“trustworthy system of general examination,” education 
would be “tested directly,” by the nature of a person’s 
occupation. Members of the educated professions ‘and gradu- 
ates of universities would be given a plurality of votes. 

The later devices that Mill suggests do not seem very 
practical. Both Hare’s scheme and the plan for plurality of 
votes for the educated are of the sort to lend themselves 
to serious abuses in the hands of practical politicians. But 


* Representative Government, p. 265. 
™ Representative Government, p. 267. 
™ Representative Government, p. 267. 
*8 Representative Government, p. 268. 


Individuality and Government 95 


they do show very plainly what the whole story of the 
development of Mill’s political thought shows—that Mill 
had gotten well away from the doctrinaire democracy of 
his predecessors, and was really trying to work out a type 
of government which, both for the sake of the individual 
and for the sake of society, would foster individual develop- 
ment. 


IV. 


This same interest on Miuill’s part, from a somewhat 
different angle, is shown in his writings on the position of 
women. Mill was not primarily interested in giving women 
the vote. ‘hat was a mere incident. What he wanted was 
that women should have the same freedom and the same 
opportunities that men have for self-culture and self-develop- 
ment. Mill’s two essays on this subject cover much the 
same ground. The essay on the Enfranchisement of Women 
was published in the Westminster Review in 1851. In his 
prefatory note in the collected essays, Mill says that it was 
largely the work of Mrs. Mill, his own share in it being 
“little more than that of an editor and amanuensis.” ~ The 
Subjection of Women, a longer essay, was written in 1861 
but not published until 1869. 

The position of women, Mill holds, is a kind of slavery, 
a relic of barbarism. It is due to the fact that men are physi- 
cally stronger, and the institutions based on man’s physical 
superiority have been perpetuated by custom. Thus the law 
gives the husband entire control over the person and property 
of his wife. In many cases this does not work hardship, on 
account of the affection that each bears to the other, but 
the situation is nevertheless bad. That it is not necessarily 
and always bad is no argument for it, any more than the 
fact that some slaveholders were kind to their slaves is an 
argument for slavery. There are three stages of morality: 


*4 Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. III. p. 93. 


96 Individualism Versus Individuality 


the “morality of submission,” when might makes right, and 
the weak do the bidding of the strong; the morality based 
on chivalry, where the stronger of his goodness is kind to 
the weaker; and the morality based on justice, where the 
weaker is given certain rights.” The morality of chivalry 
still obtains in the relation between men and women, Mill 
should not be understood as underestimating the value of 
chivalry. On the contrary, he has the highest regard for it. 
There is a large part of conduct in which it is to be man’s 
guide. But the point he is making is that when weaker 
people have to depend on chivalry in place of the protection 
of legal rights, they fare badly. 

On the question of the equality between men and women, 
Mill does not dogmatize. All he says is that you have no 
right to assume that the two sexes are fundamentally and 
innately different until you have exhausted every possibility 
of explaining their differences in terms of environmental 
factors. It is true that Mill’s inclination is to assume 
equality. Being born a man or being born a woman, and 
being born white or being born black, he speaks of in the 
same breath as being born a patrician or being born a plebian.” 
He believes that the differences between men and women 
can largely be explained by training. He quotes with approval 
Sydney Smith’s suggestion that 


“as long as boys and girls run about in the dirt and trundle hoops 
together, they are both precisely alike. If you catch up one-half 
of these creatures, and train them to a particular set of actions 
and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of 
course their understandings will differ, as one or the other sort 
of occupations has called this or that talent into action. There is 
surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reason- 
ing, in order to explain so very simple a phenomenon.” * 


*© Subjection of Women, pp. 94-95. 

*° Subjection of Women, p. 144. 

*T Subjection of Women, p. 35. 

8 Sydney Smith’s Works, Vol. I. p. 200. 


Individuality and Government 97 


The fact that women have to depend for all they get on 
winning the approval of men, Mill thinks, makes them arti- 
ficial and disingenuous, and explains most of the differences 
in character generally attributed to sex. 

At the same time, he does admit certain differences 
between men and women. He says that it may be that men’s 
brains are larger than the brains of women, ~ or that women 
are more “nervous than men.” ” This last may be an advan- 
tage rather than a disadvantage. It may explain the fact 
that women have more sense of the concrete and more power 
of “intuition’—that is, ‘a rapid and correct insight into 
present fact.” (This has nothing to do, he says, with general 
principles. “Nobody ever perceived a scientific law of nature 
by intuition, nor arrived at a general rule of duty or prudence 
by it.”) “ The skill of women as rulers both in Europe, at 
different times in history, and in India, where mothers were 
often regents for minor sons, made a great impression on 
Mill; as did also the anomaly that in England the only 
government position open to a woman was the highest one 
of all—that of Queen.” Mi{ill’s final conclusion on this 
matter is that in whatever ways women may differ from 
men constitutionally, if they turn out to differ at all, there 
is as much chance that the peculiarities of women will be 
of advantage to them in the world of affairs, as that the 
contrary will be true. In any case, if women are left free 
from the trammels of custom and adverse legislation, they 
can be depended upon to find the place where they will fit 
in best. 

The advantages of the recognition of equality between 
men and women are many. It will do away with the suffer- 
ings of many women at the hands of unkind husbands. * The 


*° Subjection of Women, p. 141. 
°° Subjection of Women, p. 133. 
* Subjection of Women, pp. 124-125. 
% Subjection of Women, p. 27. 
88 Subjection of Women, p. 173. 


98 Individualism Versus Individuality 


present situation makes men tyrannical and overbearing and 
women submissive and dependent on artifice. “ ‘“The relation 
of superiors to dependents is the nursery of these vices of 
character.” * Recognition of equality will do away with this. 
Furthermore, if women were free to enter business and the 
professions, society would gain, both because there would be 
more talent in the field, and because there would be more 
competition and therefore a higher standard set. 

Women’s votes will be on the side of adjustment of 
differences ‘‘not by fierce conflict, but by a succession of 
peaceful compromises.” “ And finally, the emancipation of 
women from their position of thraldom will mean the limita- 
tion of the number of children that will be born to them, 
and the reduction of the population. 

Again we see Mill’s interest in individuality, and his 
eagerness for that kind of freedom which will make the 
development of individuality possible. That women should 
be deprived of education, kept mere drudges in the home, 
not given the opportunity to take their rightful places in 
society, not allowed to vote, seemed to him an intolerable 
relic of barbarism. His hostility to the subjection of women 
had for its motive that same dominant interest in personality 
which was the basis of his interest in representative govern- 
ment. Whoever the individual might be—man or woman, 
rich or poor, educated or uneducated—what Mill wanted 
for him or her was more freedom for self development 
and more interest in self culture. For this he saw that a 
fair chance for self expression was essential, whether it be 
at the polls or in the broader fields of social interest. 


** Dissertations and Discussions, Vol. III. p. 122. 

° Subjection of Women, p. 79. 

8° Letters, Vol. II. p. 311. 

*" Political Economy, Vol. II. p. 349; Letters, Vol. II. p. 303. 


Chapter VII. 


Liberty and Individuality. 


ag 


In the Autobiography Mill speaks of a “remarkable 
American,” Josiah Warren, as being one of the pioneers of 
personal liberty. It was from him that he borrowed the 
phrase “the sovereignty of the individual.” * It is difficult to 
say just how much Mill knew about Josiah Warren, or how 
much influence the American had on the Englishman. But 
Warren is an interesting person for his own sake, and affords 
an interesting example of the kind of reaction that was taking 
place in the middle of the Nineteenth century against the 
various schemes of Utopian Socialism which had sprung up 
in such abundance just before. His experience was the sort 
which would further impress on Mill’s mind the lesson 
of the importance of individual freedom. Josiah Warren 
had been a member of the community which Robert Owen 
started in 1826 at New Harmony, Indiana, on the banks 
of the Wabash. Owen’s experiment failed ignominiously, 
because the people did not have sufficient thrift and industry 
to prosper under a communistic regime. Warren had all 
Owen’s faith that a new system of social organization could 
be achieved, but, having learned a lesson from the failure 
at New Harmony, he tried another plan, and in 1851 found- 
ed the village of Modern Times on Long Island, based on 
the principle of individual sovereignty. Private property was 


1 Autobiography, p. 179. 


100 Individualism Versus Individuality 


his watchword, and everybody was free to do just as he 
pleased as long as he did not interfere with others and was 
able and willing to take the consequences of his actions. 
His community had a picturesque and checkered history. 
One man advocated plurality of wives, another believed 
clothing to be superfluous “and not only attempted to 
practise his Adamic theories in person, but inflicted his views 
upon his hapless children.” A woman with an “ungainly 
form” wore men’s attire. Another young woman was “so 
obsessed with a diet mania that, after trying to live on 
beans without salt until she was reduced almost to a skeleton, 
she died within a year.” * The people wore whatever pleased 
their fancy. It is noted that the women showed more in- 
genuity in the matter of clothes than the men. A visitor 
from England wrote that going to church on Sunday in 
“Modern Times” was like going to a fancy dress ball. 

The following quotation from Warren’s paper, the 
Peaceful Revolutionist, throws light on the theoretical aspect 
of his individualism: 

“Throughout the whole of our operations at this village, every- 
thing has been conducted so nearly on the Individual basis, that 
not one meeting for legislation has taken place. No organization, 
no delegated power, no constitutions, no laws or by-laws, rules or 
regulations, but such as each individual makes for himself and 
his own business; no officers, no priests nor prophets have been 
resorted to; nothing of this kind has been in demand. 

“I do not mean to be understood that all are of one mind. 
On the contrary, in a progressive state there is no demand for 
conformity. We build on Individuality; any difference between 
us confirms our position. Differences, therefore, like the admissible 
discords in music, are a valuable part of our harmony. It is only 
when the rights of persons or property are actually invaded that 
collisions arise. These rights being clearly defined and sanctioned 
by public opinion, and temptations to encroachments being with- 
drawn, we may then consider our great problem practically solved. 
With regard to mere differences of opinion in taste, convenience, 
economy, equality, or even right and wrong, good and bad, sanity 


* Baillie, Josiah Warren, pp. 60-61. 


Liberty and Individuality IOI 


and insanity—all must be left to the supreme decision of each 
Individual, whenever he can take on himself the cost of his deci- 
sion; which he cannot do while his interests or movements are 
united or combined with others. It is in combination or close 
connection only, that compromise and conformity are required. 
Peace, harmony, ease, security, happiness, will be found only in 
Individuality.” * 


However little or however much Mill knew about War- 
ren’s community, the latter’s emphasis on individuality was 
of precisely the sort Mill was interested in. Whatever else 
it did, it put a premium on diversity, spontaneity, and compe- 
tition as factors in the development of personality. 

But one thing must be noted about Warren’s liberalism. 
It was built on the foundations of Owen’s socialistic com- 
munity, and Warren had not gone as far toward the other 
as he thought he had. He had to assume honesty and a 
certain common purpose among the members of his group, 
to say nothing of a common willingness to be different. 
If the development of individuality is to mean anything at 
all, there must be in the social structure a foundation of 
order and security, and this means submission of the individ- 
ual to the will of society in a good many matters, and the 
limitation of individuality by public opinion or by law. Thus 
Warren says in the passage quoted above, that in Modern 
Times rights of property are “clearly defined and sanctioned 
by public opinion.” This suggests that the reason that he 
was able to make his system of society work was that in 
spite of the superficial differences the members of his com- 
munity really agreed on the fundamental matters of social 
organization after all. 

And this brings us to a problem which seemed to Mill 
very important and to the solution of which he devoted 
much time and energy. {The motive behind Mill’s economic 
and political doctrine is so to order social life as to help the 


® Noyes, American Socialisms, p. 98. 


102 Individualism Versus Individuality 


development of individuality. For this freedom is necessary. 

at spontaneity and diversity which alone can make life 
interesting and worth while can only come about when 
individuals are left free to manage their own lives in their 
own ways.{But the liberties of one person very often conflict 
with the liberties of another, or—more important still— 
the social regulations designed to protect the liberties of 
all interfere with the liberty of some. \The problem which 
presented itself to Mill was that of finding a principle on 
the basis of which to draw the line between the field in 
which the individual should be free to do as he pleases and 
the field when his actions could properly be regulated by 
society. 

‘To“discover such a principle is the avowed purpose of 
the Essay on Liberty. Mill’s answer is familiar. It is that 


eo 

“the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or 
collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of 
their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which 
power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized 
munity, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” # 





But in his attempt to apply his principle Mill fails, as he 
had failed in Ethology, and in his other attempts at a uni- 
versal science of life. {Mill’s view pictures individuals as a 
lot of separate units, little atoms if you like, each animated 
by certain expanding wants and desires of its own. These 
conflict, to a certain extent, but there is a vastly larger field 
where they do not conflict, but rathe ist and help satisfy 
the wants and desires of each other Phe problem in terms 
of the association psychology is to regulate the behaviour of 
each unit by means of laws, duties and sanctions, so there 
will be as little conflict as possible./So much Mill inherited 
from Bentham and his father. He would add that another 
thing to be done was by means of education in the broadest 


* Liberty, p. 73. 


Liberty and Individuality 103 


sense to deepen and enrich the field where individual desires 
do not conflict, but rather aid and further each other. 

It is not the purpose of this chapter either to undertake 
a thorough criticism of Miuill’s principle and the point of 
view that underlies it, or to review the criticisms that have 
been made. There are, however, certain difficulties which 
it will serve our purpose to bring out. In the first place it 
should be noted that it is impossible to make a clear-cut 
distinction between a person’s private affairs and those of 
his doings which affect society. A sharp line cannot be drawn. 


As Fitzjames Stephen says, it is like trying to distinguish 


between acts done in space and acts done in time. As soon 
as you get a conception of society which takes account of the 
interdependence of individuals, you see that anything affect- 
ing one individual affects to some extent every other in- 
dividual. Mill half realizes this. He says: “When I say 
only himself I mean directly and in the first instance; for 
whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself.” ° 
He admits that “no person is an entirely isolated being; 
it is impossible for a person to do anything seriously or 
permanently hurtful to himself, without mischief reaching 
at least to his near connections, and often far beyond them”’: ° 


“T fully admit that the mischief which a person does to himself 
may seriously affect, both through their sympathies and their 
interests, those nearly connected with him, and, in a minor degree, 
society at large. When, by conduct of this sort, a person is led 
to violate a distinct and assignable obligation to any other person 
or persons, the case is taken out of the self-regarding class, and 
becomes amenable to moral disapprobation in the proper sense 
of the term.” ’ 

“But with regard to the merely contingent, or, if as it may be 
called, constructive injury which a person causes to society, by 
conduct which neither violates any specific duty to the public, nor 
occasions perceptible hurt to any assignable individual except 


5 Liberty, p. 75. 
° Liberty, p. 136. 
7 Liberty, pp. 137-138. 


ened! 


104 Individualism Versus Individuality 


himself, the inconvenience is one which society can afford to bear, 
for the sake of the greater good of human freedom. If grown 
persons are to be punished for not taking proper care of themselves, 
I would rather it were for their own sake, than under pretence of 
preventing them from impairing their capacity of rendering to 
society benefits which society does not pretend it has a right to 
exact.” ° 

If we look simply at Mill’s formal argument, it is easy to 
convict him of getting out of this difficulty by begging the 
question. “What,” he asks, ‘is the rightful limit to the 
sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the 
authority of society begin? How much of human life should 
be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?” ® 
‘The limit is reached, he says, when the person is “led to 
violate a distinct and assignable obligation,’ or when he 
“violates any specific duty to the public.’ We know this 
already. What we have been trying to find out is, what 
obligations should be assigned, and what duties should be 
specified by the public. 


i 


But we must not be satisfied with such an easy victory. 
This is obviously a slip on Mill’s part, and his real meaning 
will be missed if we rest satisfied with a superficial analysis. 
To get at the root of Mill’s difficulty it will be necessary 
to examine somewhat more closely the nature of the principle 
he tries to employ. 

There are three ways in which one may try to use a 
principle such as this principle of Mill’s. One may try to 
use it as a rule, by which automatically to decide questions 
which involve a conflict between the individual and society; 
or one may use it as a statement of a goal, of an ideal; 
or finally one may use it as a reminder and an exhortation. 
‘Take a simpler case by way of illustration—the command- 


® Liberty, p. 138. 
® Liberty, p. 131. 


Liberty and Individuality 105 


ment “Thou shalt do no murder.” If we accept this as a 
sort of geometrical axiom and try to deduce from it what 
kind of killing is murder and what is not, we get into all 
kinds of trouble. Obviously, there are certain cases of killing 
which would not be said to constitute murder. But if we 
try to find out from the command what does and what does 
not constitute murder, we will simply be deceiving ourselves 
and giving a sort of divine sanction to our previously held 
opinions and prejudices. Murder is really the kind of killing 
which, in any stage of enlightenment, is felt by people gener- 
ally to be socially undesirable. Just what constitutes murder 
is to be found out not dialectically, but by a study of the 
facts. This will mean that it is impossible to draw any hard 
and fast line in general terms between what is murder and 
what is not. But that does not mean that we may all go 
around killing people. The moral precept ‘“Thou shalt do 
no murder’ can still be used as a statement of an aim— 
an ideal—with the understanding that the content is to be 
determined by study of concrete cases. This is an illustration 
of the second way a principle may be used—that is, to 
express an aim. The third use is perhaps not very different 
from the foregoing. The commandment, “Thou shalt do no 
murder,” may be used homiletically as it were, as an exhor- 
tation, a reminder, to keep before people the desirability of 
not killing their fellow men. 

The same analysis may be applied to Muill’s self-protec- 
tion principle. Take for example the position of someone 
who had to vote on the Eighteenth Amendment when it 
came up in 1918. Assume that he tries to let his conduct 
be guided by Mill’s principle. “Shall I vote for the amend- 
ment or not?” he asks himself. Then he enunciates to 
himself the principle. “If the use of liquor is an individual 
question, 1 must vote against the amendment,” he would 
have to say. “If it is a question where the acts of the individ- 
ual have bad social effects I must vote for it.”’ When the 


106 Individualism Versus Individuality 


matter is stated in this way, certain things are clear. In the 
first place drinking obviously affects both the individual and 
society. The real question is not which does it affect, as a 
matter of fact, but which effect should be regarded as more 
important for the purpose of the law. That is, the principle 
is of value as an aim, as an ideal. But just how to apply it to 
a given situation remains to be seen. And in solving this 
question, the principle as something from which an answer 
may be deduced, does not give any help at all. What the 
legislator will have to do is to look about him, get definite 
information about definite conditions, and on the basis of 
this concrete material make up his mind whether the passage 
of the amendment would be for the social good or not. But 
here the principle might come in again as a reminder to the 
legislator not to forget the value of freedom for its own 
sake, and not to think so much of social advantage and 
disadvantage in terms of public health and national pros- 
perity and the birth rate and death rate as to forget that 
there is a real value in letting individuals work out their 
own problems and live their own lives as far as it is possible 
to do so. 

So it was when Mill tried to apply this principle himself. 
As a general principle from which to deduce other principles 
it did not get him anywhere. His significant use of it was in 
the second and third of the ways mentioned above, to em- 
phasize the value of liberty when it came to the deciding of 
questions where individual liberty conflicted with social or- 
ganization. His principle was a doctrine called forth by 
the times—a sort of publicity scheme used (unconsciously 
on Mill’s part) to keep advertising the importance for its 
own sake of individual freedom. 

The same criticism might be applied to this principle 
of Mill’s which he applied to his father’s doctrine of uni- 
versal selfishness as a basis for a philosophy of government. 
It was primarily a doctrine of reform. As an argument 


Liberty and Individuality 107 


for more liberty of thought and discussion, more freedom 
from the restraint by convention of our daily lives, it had a 
real effectiveness. If John Stuart Mill had been willing to 
admit that he was simply trying to defend the individual 
against too much social control he would have been on more 
certain ground. But he made the mistake which James Mill 
made before him, of claiming for his principle universal 
applicability. This brings us back to where we started from, 
and enables usto see that the real motive behind MaAll’s 
criterion was the desire to emphasize and protect individu- 
ality, to point out that in any weighing and balancing of 
advantages, that must not be left Sa 

It may be remarked incidentally that the same analysis 
may be applied to the greatest happiness principle itself. 
Its meaning depends upon what one considers happiness. A 
person who values liberty more highly than he does security 
or ease or physical comfort will develop a very different 
system of ethics from it than will the person who puts secur- 
ity and the rest first. This is another difference between 
John Stuart Mill and Bentham. Though both pay homage 
to the greatest happiness principle, Mill rates liberty high 
in his scale of values, whereas for Bentham it is a long way 
down on the list. 

But to go back to Mill’s principle for determining the 
proper limits for society’s control over the individual, it 
should be pointed out that the real trouble with a principle 
like this is that it makes it possible for a person to decide 
questions on the basis of prejudice, calling it deduction from 
the principle, in place of realizing and facing the importance 
of studying the specific problems in concrete terms. There 
is danger of the same trouble which Mill saw so clearly 
in the philosophy of the intuitionalists. Mill, to be sure, 
did realize the need of a study of concrete situations. In 
his economic and political writings, as we have seen, he 
resolutely tried to study conditions as they were. But he 


108 Individualism Versus Individuality 


was never willing to let the ultimate solution of his problem 
come simply out of the situation itself. He felt that he had 
to go back to his principle for an ultimate sanction. 

A distinction similar to that we have just made is made 
by Professor Dewey in almost the same terms. He says: 

“The fundamental error of the intuitionalist and of the utili- 
tarian is that they are on the lookout for rules which will of 
themselves tell agents just what course of action to pursue; where- 
as the object of moral principles is to supply standpoints and 
methods which will enable the individual to make for himself an 


analysis of the elements of good and evil in the particular situation 
in which he finds himself.” *° 


Again he says: 


“A moral principle, then, is not a command to act or forbear 
acting in a given way: it is a tool for analyzing a special situation, 
the right or wrong being determined by the situation in its entirety, 
and not by the rule as such.” * 


Mill never made this distinction between a rule and a 
principle in Professor Dewey’s sense. He talked as if the 
self-protection principle was a rule; but when it came to the 
application of it to concrete situations, his decisions were de- 
termined by the factors which went to make up the situation. 


Til. 


There are certain crucial instances of Mill’s attempt to 
apply this principle, where it may be seen quite clearly that 
the basis of his decision lies not in the principle itself but in 
various other factors. These examples illustrate two things— 
first the failure of the approach in terms of the association 
psychology and the universal doctrine of ends, and second 
the fact that Mill really decided these questions with con- 
siderable wisdom and common sense, on the basis of his 


270 Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, p. 333. 
™ Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, p. 334. 


Liberty and Individuality 109 


interest in personality. Take the case of children for instance. 
Mill believes in the supervision of children ‘‘for their own 
good” and for that of society. ” He has to begin by admitting 
that this is an exception to the general principle. If his 
principle was really to be determinative universally he would 
have to show where to draw the line between children and 
grown-ups, obviously a difficult matter. To fall back on the 
“age which the law may fix as that of manhood and woman- 
hood” is an unsatisfactory way out. But from the point of 
view of common sense and an interest in personality, clearly 
children need more supervision than adults. They must be 
taught to respect the personality of others. They must be 
sent to school. They must be made to conform to certain of 
the more necessary conventions of the society in which they 
live. 

Or take the case of uncivilized peoples, where Mill’s 
experiences at the India House come to the front. This is 
another exception. Mill says “‘despotism is a legitimate mode 
of dealing with barbarians.” But it is a difficult matter to 
tell just who are barbarians and who can be called civilized. 
In the essay on Representative Government, Mill gives 
certain criteria on the basis of which to judge whether 
a people is capable of self-government or not, but it is im- 
possible to draw a sharp line. And he says, “Liberty, as a 
principle, has no application to any state of things anterior 
to the time when mankind have become capable of being 
improved by free and equal discussion.” * To such an admis- 
sion does Muill’s principle lead him! As we saw in the last 
chapter, the thing in which Mill is really interested in his 
philosophy of government is the development of individuality. 
His distinction between those who are capable of self-govern- 
ment and those who are not is a consistent part of this 
philosophy. He would have done better, at least from a 


© Liberty, p. 73. 
8 Liberty, p. 73. 


110 Individualism Versus Individuality 


logical point of view, to have admitted that this was his 
criterion than to have attempted to make an artificial con- 
nection between his conclusion and his principle of liberty. 
Two other examples of a different sort provide further 
illustrations of the fact that the determining factor in Muill’s 
solution of concrete problems of conflict between the individ- 
ual and society was his interest in individuality. One is the 
question of drunkenness. Mill starts in by saying that drink- 
ing is an individual matter. The State should not prohibit 
it. But if a person once committed a crime under the influence 
of liquor, he 
“should be placed under a special legal restriction, personal to 
himself; that if he were afterward found drunk, he should be 
liable to a penalty, and that if when in that state he committed 
another offense, the punishment to which he would be liable for 
that offense should be increased in severity. The making himself 


drunk, in a person drunkenness excites to do harm to others, is a 
crime against others.” * 


The State should not “tax stimulants for the sole purpose 
of making them more difficult to be obtained,’ because it 
is a measure “differing only in degree from their entire 
prohibition.” But, on the other hand, the State has to levy 
some taxes. In doing this it should select for taxation those 
things ‘‘of which it deems the use, beyond a very moderate 
quantity, to be positively injurious.” “Taxation, therefore, of 
stimulants, up to the point which produces the largest amount 
of revenue (supposing that the State needs all the revenue 
which it yields) is not only admissible, but to be approved 
of.” The regulations with regard to places where liquor is 
sold should be simply for the purpose of keeping the peace. ” 

Taking it simply as the basis of social advantage, and 
bearing in mind that, other things being equal, the freedom 
of the individual to do what he likes in the interest of indi- 


14 Liberty, p. 153. 
% Liberty, p. 156. 


Liberty and Individuality III 


viduality is to be fostered, Mill’s conclusion in the first part 
of the above paragraph sounds like common sense. But his 
attempt to make it appear that his conclusion is a deduction 
from his principle is labored, to say the least. 

‘The second example has to do with the question of mar- 
riage. One might well expect Mill to regard marriage as 
above all other matters the personal concern of the two people 
involved. His own friendship for Mrs. Taylor he regarded 
as nobody’s business but his and hers. He speaks of it as a 
matter “so entirely personal” that they did not think the 
“ordinances of society” binding with regard to it. * Yet Mill 
felt most strongly the importance for society of restricting 
the population, and to this end not only advocated education 
and self-restraint, but approved of laws prohibiting marriage 
until the prospective husband could show that he had suffi- 
cient means to rear a family according to a decent standard 
of living. ” 

A correspondent (Dr. MacCormac, of Belfast) wrote 
to him and asked him about this. Writing from Avignon 
under date of December 4, 1865, Mill replies: 

“Dear Sir: In answer to your letter of 29th November, I would 
say, that restrictions on marriage, or on any other human action, 
when so conducted as to be directly injurious to others than the 
agents themselves, do not appear to me objectionable on the 
principle of liberty. For all our actions which affect the interests 
of other people I hold that we are morally, and may without 
violation of principle be made legally, responsible. I have, how- 
ever, expressly guarded myself against being understood to mean 
that legal restrictions on marriage are expedient. That is an alto- 
gether different question, to which I conceive no universal and 
peremptory answer can be given, and in deciding which for any 
particular case due weight ought to be given to the probability of 


consequences of the kind you mention, as well as of any other 
kinds.” * 


1% Autobiography, p. 161. 
Cf. Leslie Stephen, English Utilitarians, Vol. III. p. 228. 
8 Letters, Vol. Il. p. 48. 


112 Individualism Versus Individuality 


This is a case in which it is more than ever clear that the 
distinction between what affects the individual and what 
affects other people is purely formal. Every action affects 
both the agent himself and other people. In some cases the 
effect upon the agents is the more important, in other cases the 
effect on other people is to be most considered. In questions 
where the two are closely balanced, as here, which way the 
decision will go depends upon the interests and prejudices of 
the person doing the judging. It is clear that in this question 
of marriage the deciding factor in determining Mill’s opinion 
was his interest in the limitation of the population, which 
was closely related, on the one hand, to the economic ques- 
tions we have discussed above, and on the other to his desire 
to protect women, for the sake of fuller development of 
personality, from excessive child bearing with the pain and 
drudgery that it involves. His conclusion was not really de- 
duced from his principle at all. 


IV. 


In the last book of the Political Economy there is a 
discussion of the “Ground and Limits of the Laisser-faire or 
Non-interference Principle” in which Mill takes up this 
same question with particular reference to economic prob- 
lems. ‘‘No subject,” he says, “has been more keenly contested 
in the present age,” and he goes on to summarize some of 
the things that have been said. He then says for himself, 
significantly enough: 


; 


“Without professing entirely to supply this deficiency of a 
general theory, on a question which does not, as I conceive, admit 
of any universal solution, I shall attempt to afford some little aid 
towards the resolution of this class of questions as they arise, by 
examining, in the most general point of view in which the subject 
can be considered, what are the advantages and what the evils 
or inconveniences, of government interference.” * 


19 Political Economy, p. 559. The italics are mine. C. L. S. 


Liberty and Individuality 113 


He goes on to restate his principle: 


“Whatever theory we adopt respecting the foundation of We 
cial union, and under whatever political institutions we live, 
hee is a circle around every individual human being, which no 
government, be it that of one, of a few, or of the many, ought to 
be permitted to overstep yyythere i is a part of the life of every person 
who has come to years of discretion, within which the individuality 
of that person ought to reign uncontrolled either by any other 
individual or by the public collectively. That there is, or ought 
to be, some space in human existence thus entrenched around, and 
peored from authoritative intrusion, no one who nr ofesues the 
smallest regard to human freedom or dignity will call in question: 
the point to be determined is, where the limit should be placed; 
how large a province of human life this reserved territory eye 
include. I apprehend that it ought to include all that part mii 
concerns only the life, whether inward or outward, of the individ- 
ual, and does not affect the interests of o er6;-or—efieets- 
él through the moral influence of example./. . . To be prevented 
from doing what one is inclined to, or from acting according a 
one’s own judgment of what is desirable, is not only always 
irksome, but always tends, pro tanto, to starve the development 
of some portion of the bodily or mental faculties, either acea 
or active; and unless the conscience of the individual goes freely 
with the legal restraint, it partakes, either in a great or in a small | 
degree, of the degradation of slavery. Scarcely any degree of { 
utility, short of absolute necessity, will justify a prohibitory regu- 
lation, unless it can also be made to recommend itself to the general 
conscience; unless persons of ordinary good intentions either believe 
already, or can be induced to believe, that the thing prohibited is a 
thing which they ought not to wish to do. 















His position here seems to be essentially that which we 
have suggested above—that the purpose of the non-interfer- 
ence principle is primarily to protect the individual and the 
growth of individuality. He does not look upon it as a 
“universal solution.” If Mill had seen this more clearly and 
had held to this position in his later work, he would have 
been spared much misunderstanding and criticism. 

* * * * % * 


°° Political Economy, pp. 560-561. 


114 Individualism Versus Individuality 


That in which Mill was most interested in all his work 
was the development.of individuality. This was partly due 
to his own experience. The reactiorr from his strenuous and 
one-sided early education brought with it a period of 
mental depression which found a partial solution in some 
new and strong personal attachments, and a new interest 
in individuality. This was re-inforced by the whole reaction 
of the early nineteenth century against the intellectualism 
of the eighteenth. And with this came, though more slowly, 
a growing sense of the inadequacy of the political and social 
and economic philosophy of the Early Utilitarians satis- 
factorily to account for the richness and color and variety 
in life of which Mill’s interest in individuality made him 
conscious. And so, whether it were in political economy, 
in the philosophy of government, or in his thought upon 
more general social questions, \the final test of the value 
of any program was for him its effect on individuality. 7 
In the art of life (as opposed to the science of life) the 
guiding principle was for him as it was for his father and 
Jeremy Bentham the greatest happiness of the greatest num- 
ber. But in interpreting the greatest happiness principle that 
which seemed to John Stuart Mill most important—far 
more important than mere physical well-being—was liberty, 
individuality, the freedom of the individual for the develop- 
ment of personality. People must have, to be sure, a suffi- 
cient amount of the physical necessities and conveniences 
of life, and a certain amount of economic independence, 
But more than this, they must have education, a share ix 
government, and, if possible, a share in the direction of the 
industry in which they work. They must have a certain 
amount of opposition to overcome an incentive for self-im- 
provement. (They must be free to live their own lives as 
they see fit, and at the same time there must be protection 
against wanton interference on their part with the freedom 
of other people, \John Stuart Mill’s eye was fixed on indi- 


Liberty and Individuality 11S 


viduality as his goal. Gb study and active effort on specific 
problems was always to see how in a particular matter the 
cause of individuality might be advanced. We of the twenti- 
eth century are only beginning to learn the two-fold lesson 
which he taught—the importance of the development of 
individuality in its richest diversity and the need of accurate 
and painstaking study of concrete problems to see how this 
may be achieved. 





Bibliography 
I. Source MATERIAL 
WORKS BY JOHN STUART MILL 


1, Early Works, up to 1840. 


Articles in Westminster Review. 
Six hitherto unpublished speeches. World’s Classics 
Edition of Autobiography. 

Review of The Use and Abuse of Political Terms, by 
G. C. Lewis. Edinburgh Magazine, Volume I. 
Correspondence Inédite de John Stuart Mill et Gus- 

tave d Eichthal. Paris, F. Alcan, 1898. 
Early Essays of John Stuart Mill. Bohn Library. 


2. 1840 to 1860. 


Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political 
Economy. J. W. Parker, 1844. 

Dissertations and Discussions. Five volumes. Wil- 
liam V. Spencer, Boston, 1865. 

A System of Logic (1843). Eighth Edition. Harper 
and Brothers, 1904. 

Principles of Political Economy (1848). Fifth Lon- 
don Edition, Two volumes. D. Appleton & Co., 
1878. 

Letters d’Auguste Comte & John Stuart Mill, 1841- 
1846. Paris, E. Leroux, 1877. 


118 Individualism Versus Individuality 


3- 1860 to 1874. 

Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Govern- 
ment. Everyman Edition. J. M. Dent & Son, 
1910, 

The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1865). 
Henry Holt & Co., 1873. 

An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Phiios- 
ophy (1865). William V. Spencer, 1865. 

The Subjection of Women (1869). Frederick A. 
Stokes, 1911. 

Autobiography (1873). Henry Holt & Co., 1874. 

Autobiography, and six hitherto unpublished speeches. 

Preface by Harold Laski. The World’s Classics. 

Oxford University Press, 1924. 

Autobiography. Columbia University Press, 1924. 

Three Essays on Religion (1874). Henry Holt & 
Co., 1874. 

Socialism and Utilitarianism (1874). Belford, 
Clarke & Co., 1888. 

Letters of John Stuart Mill. Eliot Edition. Long- 
mans Green & Co., 1910. 


II. SourcE MATERIAL 
WORKS BY OTHER WRITERS. 


Bain, Alexander: 
The Emotions and the Will. Longmans Green & Co., 
1865. 
The Senses and the Intellect. Longmans Green & Co., 
1868. 
Bentham, Jeremy: 
Collected Works. Edinburgh. W. Taite, 1843. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: 
Aids to Reflection. 
Idea of Church and State. New York. Harper, 1884. 


Bibhography 119 


Comte, Auguste: 
General View of Positivism. 
Fox, Caroline: 
Memories of Old Friends. Seaside Library, Vol. LXI; 
No. 1234. 
Macaulay, Thomas Babington: 
Collected Works. Albert Cogswell, New York. 
Mill, James: 
Elements of Political Economy. Third Edition. London. 
H. G. Bohn, 1844. 
Analysis of the Human Mind. Longmans Greén Reader 
and Dyer, 1869. 
Ricardo, David: 
Political Economy. George Bell & Son, 1895. 
Von Humboldt, Wilhelm: 
Sphere and Duties of Government. John Chapman, 1854. 


III. SEconpary Works 


Bain, Alexander: 
John Stuart Mill. Henry Holt, New York, 1882. 
Bonar, James: 
Philosophy and Political Economy in Some of Their 
Historical Relations. New York. Macmillan, 1893. 
Courtney, W. L.: 
Life of John Stuart Mill. London. W. Scott, 1889. 
Douglas, Charles: 

Ethics of John Stuart Mill. W. Blackwood & Sons, 
1897. 

Dicey, Albert Venn: 

Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public 
Opinion in England in the Nineteenth Century. Mac- 
millan, 1905. 

Garnier, H. K.: 

J.8. Mill and the Philosophy of Mediation. W. D. Gray, 

1919. 


120 Individualism Kersus Individuality 


Gide and Riste: 
A History of Economic Doctrines. George G. Harrop 
and Co., 1915. 
Hadley, A. T.: 
Liberty and Equality. Houghton Mifflin Co. 
Neff, Emery: 
Mill and Carlyle. Columbia University Press, 1924. 
Ritchie, David G.: 
Natural Rights. New York. Macmillan, 1903. 
Stephen, Leslie: 
The English Utilitarians New York. G. P. Putnam’s 
Sons, 1900. 
Wallas, Graham: 
The Great Society. Macmillan, 1914. 


Appendix 


JOHN STuART Mitnw’s REVIEW OF 
GEORGE CORNWALL LEwIs’ 


Use and Abuse of Political Terms. 


Reprinted from Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. I (April 
to September, 1832), page 164 ff.* 


Use and Abuse of Political Terms.’ 


Mr. Lewis is known in society as the son of the Right 
Hon. T. Frankland Lewis, and in literature, as the translator, 
jointly with Mr. Henry Tufnell, of two erudite and inter- 
esting works on classical antiquity, Muller’s Dorians, and 
Bockh’s Public Economy of Athens. Mr. Lewis is also the 
author of a little work on logic; to which subject, stimulated 
like many others of the Oxford youth, by the precepts and 
example of Dr. Whately, he has devoted more than common 
attention, and was so far peculiarly qualified for writing such 
a work as the volume before us professes to be. This alone 


1Use and Abuse of Political Terms. By George Cornwall Lewis, Esq., 
Student of Christ Church, Oxford. London: Fellowes, 1832. 

* It seems worth while to reprint this review as it has never been 
reprinted and Tait’s Magazine is difficult to procure. Mill’s reference 
to the review in his letter to Carlyle in 1834, in which he says that it 
“paints exactly” the state of his ‘‘mind and feeling” at the time it was 
written, makes it of some biographical interest, and it throws a good deal 
of light on the broadening out of Mill’s point of view which took place 
during these years. 


122 Individualism Versus Individuality 


should entitle him to no slight praise; for such is the present 
state of the human mind, in some important departments, 
that it is often highly meritorious to have written a book, 
in itself of no extraordinary merit, if the work afford proof 
that any one of the requisites for writing a good book on the 
same subject is possessed in an eminent degree. 

Certain it is, that there scarcely ever was a period when 
logic was so little studied, systematically, and in a scientific 
manner, as of late years; while, perhaps, no generation ever 
had less to plead in extenuation of neglecting it. For if, in 
order to reason well, it were only necessary to be destitute 
of every spark of fancy and poetic imagination, the world of 
letters and thought might boast, just now, of containing few 
besides good reasoners; people to whom, one would imagine, 
that logic must be all in all, if we did not, to our astonish- 
ment, find that they despise it. But the most prosaic matter- 
of-fact person in the world must not flatter himself that he 
is able to reason because he is fit for nothing else. Reasoning, 
like all other mental excellencies, comes by appropriate cul- 
ture; not by exterminating the opposite good quality, the 
other half of a perfect character. Perhaps the mere reasoners, 
with whom the world abounds, would be considerably less 
numerous, if men really took the pains to learn to reason. 
It is a sign of a weak judgment, as of a weak virtue, to 
take to flight at the approach of every thing which can, by 
any remote possibility, lead it astray. Men who, for want of 
cultivation, have the intellects of dwarfs, are, of course, 
the slaves of their imagination, if they have any, as they 
are the slaves of their sensations, if they have not; and it is 
partly, perhaps, because the systematic culture of the thinking 
faculty is in little repute, that imagination also is in such 
bad odour; there being no solidity and vigour of intellect 
to resist it where it tends to mislead. The sublimest of 
English poets composed an elementary book of logic for 
the schools; but our puny rhymsters think logic, forsooth, 


Appendix b22 


too dry for them;* and our logicians, from that and other 
causes, very commonly say with M. Casimir Perier, 4 quoi 
un poete est-il bon? 

In undertaking to treat of the use and abuse of the leading 
terms of political philosophy, Mr. Lewis has set before him- 
self a task to which no one but a logician could be competent, 
and one of the most important to which logic could be ap- 
plied. If, however, we were disposed for minute criticism, we 
might find some scope for it in the very title-page. We might 
ask, what is meant by an abuse of terms; and whether a 
man is not at liberty to employ terms in any way which 
enables him to deliver himself of his own ideas the most 
intelligibly; to bring home to the minds of others, in the 
greatest completeness, the impression which exists in his own? 
This question, though it has a considerable bearing upon 
many parts of Mr. Lewis’ book, throws, however, no doubt 
upon the importance of the object he aims at. His end is, 
to prevent things essentially different, from being confounded, 
because they happen to be called by the same name. It is 
past doubt that this, like all other modes of false and slovenly 
thinking, might be copiously exemplified from the field of 
politics; and Mr. Lewis has not been unhappy in his choice 
of examples. The instances, in which the confusion of lan- 


*The greatest English poet of our own times lays no claim to this 
theory of thought. Those whom Mr. Wordsworth honours with his 
acquaintance, know it to be one of his favorite opinions, that want of 
proper intellectual culture, much more than the rarity of genius, is the 
cause why there are so few true poets; the foundation of poetry, as 
of all other productions of man’s reason, being logic. By logic, he does 
not mean syllogisms in mode and figure, but justness of thought and 
precision of language; and, above all, knowing accurately your own 
meaning. While we are on this subject, we must be permitted to express our 
regret, that a poet who has meditated as profoundly on the theory of his 
art, as he has laboured assiduously in its practice, should have put forth 
nothing which can convey any adequate notion to posterity of his merits 
in this department; and that philosophical speculations on the subject of 
poetry, with which it would be folly to compare any others existing in 
our language, have profited only to a few private friends, 


124 Individualism Versus Individuality 


guage is the consequence, and not the cause, of the erroneous 
train of thought (which we believe to be generally the more 
common case), are equally worthy of Mr. Lewis’ attention, 
and will, no doubt, in time receive an equal share of it. 

Some notion of the extent of ground over which our 
author travels may be gathered from his table of contents; 
which, with that view, we transcribe: 


“1, Government. 2. Constitution—Constitutional. 3. Right— 
Duty—Wrong—Rightful—Wrongful—Justice. 4. Law—Lawful— 
Unlawful. 5. Sovereign—Sovereignty—Division of Forms of Gov- 
ernment. 6. Monarchy—Royalty—King. 7. Commonwealth—Re- 
public—Republican. 8. Aristocracy—Oligarchy—Nobility. 9. De- 
mocracy. 1o. Mixed Government—Balance of Powers. 11. People 
—Community. 12. Representation—Representative—Representative 
Government. 13. Rich—Middle Class—Poor. 14. Nature—Natural 
—Unnatural—State of Nature. 15. Liberty—Freedom—Free. 16. 
Free Government—Arbitrary Government—T yranny—Despotism— 
Anarchy. 17. Power—Authority—Force. 18. Public—Private— 
Political—Civil—Municipal. 19. Property—Possession—Estate— 
Estates of Parliament. 20. Community of Goods.” 


To explain thoroughly the various senses of any one of 
these terms, would require, possibly, as much space as Mr. 
Lewis has devoted to them all. His observations, however, 
are those of an instructed and intelligent mind. They contain, 
perhaps, not much that is absolutely new; except that ideas, 
which the mind has made completely its own, always come 
out in a form more or less different from that in which they 
went in, and are, in that sense, always original. Moreover, 
any one who can look straight into a thing itself, and not 
merely at its image mirrored in another man’s mind, can 
also look at things, upon occasion, when there is no other 
man to point them out.’ 


* Mr. Lewis has very properly, in our opinion, spared himself the 
ostentatious candour of mentioning the authors to whom he was indebted, 
they being mostly writers of established reputation. Such studious honesty 
in disclaiming any private right to truths which are the common property 


Appendix 125 


Yet, highly as we think of this work, and still more 
highly of the author’s capabilities, we will not pretend that 
he has realized all our conceptions of what such a work 
ought to be. We do not think he is fully conscious of what 
his subject requires of him. The most that he ever seems 
to accomplish, is to make out that something is wrong, but 
not how that which is wrong may be made right. He may 
say, that this is all he aimed at; and so, indeed, it is. But 
it may always be questioned, whether one has indeed cut 
down to the very root of an error, who leaves no truth 
planted in its stead. Mr. Lewis, at least, continually leaves 
the mind under the unsatisfactory impression, that the matter 
has not been probed to the bottom, and that underneath 
almost everything which he sees, there lies something deeper 
which he does not see. If in this we should be deemed hyper- 
critical, we would say in our defense, that we should never 
think of ranging Mr. Lewis in the class of those, from whom 
we take thankfully and without asking questions, any trifling 
matter, which is all they have to bestow. The author of 
such a work as the present, is entitled to be tried by the 
same standard as the highest order of intellect; to be com- 
pared not with the small productions of small minds, but 
with ideal perfection. 

Mankind have many ideas, and but few words. This 
truth should never be absent from the mind of one who 
takes upon him to decide if another man’s language is philo- 
sophical or the reverse. —I'wo consequences follow from it; 


of mankind, generally implies either that the author cares, and expects 
the reader to care, more about the ownership of an idea than about its 
value; or else that he designs to pass himself off as the first promulgator 
of every thought which he does expressly assign to the true discov- 
erer. This is one of the thousand forms of that commonest of egotisms, 
egotism under a show of modesty. The only obligations which Mr. Lewis 
with a just discrimination stops to acknowledge, are to a philosopher who 
is not yet so well known as he deserves to be, Mr. Austin, Professor of 
Jurisprudence in the University of London. 


126 Individualism Versus Individuality 


one, that a certain laxity in the use of language must be 
borne with, if a writer makes himself understood; the other, 
that, to understand a writer who is obliged to use the same 
words as a vehicle for different ideas, requires a vigorous 
effort of co-operation on the part of the reader. These un- 
avoidable ambiguities render it easier, we admit, for confu- 
sion of ideas to pass undetected: but they also render it more 
dificult for any man’s ideas to be so expressed that they 
shall not appear confused; particularly when viewed with 
that habitual contempt with which men of clear ideas gener- 
ally regard those, any of whose ideas are not clear, and 
with that disposition which contempt, like every other pas- 
sion, commonly carries with it, to presume the existence of 
its object. It should be recollected, too, that many a man has 
a mind teeming with important thoughts, who is quite in- 
capable of putting them into words which shall not be liable 
to any metaphysical objection; that when this is the case, 
the logical incoherence or incongruity of the expression, is 
commonly the very first thing which strikes the mind, and 
that which there is least merit in perceiving. The man of 
superior intellect, in that case, is not he who can only see 
that the proposition precisely as stated, is not true; but he 
who, not overlooking the incorrectness at the surface, does, 
nevertheless, discern that there is truth at the bottom. The 
logical defect, on the other hand, is the only thing which 
strikes the eye of the mere logician. The proper office, we 
should have conceived, of a clear thinker, would be to make 
other men’s thoughts clear for them, if they cannot do it 
for themselves, and to give words to the man of genius, fitted 
to express his ideas with philosophical accuracy. Socrates, 
in the beautiful dialogue called the Phaedrus, describes his 
own vocation as that of a mental midwife: not so Mr. A. or 
B., who, perhaps, owes the advantage of clear ideas to the 
fact of his having no ideas which it is at all difficult to 
make clear. The use of logic, it would seem, to such a 


Appendix T27 


person, is not to help others, but to privilege himself against 
being required to listen to them. He will not think it worth 
his while to examine what a man has to say, unless it is put 
to him in such a manner that it shall cost him no trouble 
at all to make it out. If you come to him needing help, you 
may learn from him that you are a fool; but you certainly 
will not be made wise. 

It would be grossly unjust to Mr. Lewis to accuse him 
of anything approaching to this; but we could have wished 
that his work could have been more decidedly cited as an 
example of the opposite quality. We desiderate in it some- 
what more of what becomes all men, but, most of all, a 
young man, to whom the struggles of life are only in their 
commencement, and whose spirit cannot yet have been wound- 
ed, or his temper embittered by hostile collision with the 
world, but which, in young men more especially, is apt to 
be wanting—a slowness to condemn. A man must now learn, 
by experience, what once came almost by nature to those 
who had any faculty of seeing; to look upon all things with 
a benevolent, but upon great men and their works with a 
reverential spirit; rather to seek in them for what he may 
learn from them, than for opportunities of showing what 
they might have learned from him; to give such men the 
benefit of every possibility of their having spoken with a 
rational meaning; not easily or hastily to persuade himself 
that men like Plato, and Locke, and Rousseau, and Bentham, 
gave themselves a world of trouble in running after some- 
thing which they thought was a reality, but which he, Mr. 
A. B., can clearly see to be an unsubstantial phantom; to 
exhaust every other hypothesis, before supposing himself wiser 
than they; and even then to examine, with good will and 
without prejudice, if their error do not contain some germ 
of truth; and if any conclusion, such as a philosopher can 
adopt, may even yet be built upon the foundation on which 
they, it may be, have reared nothing but an edifice of sand. 


128 Individualism Versus Individuality 


Such men are not refuted because they are convicted of 
using words occasionally with no very definite meaning, or 
even of founding an argument upon an ambiguity. The sub- 
stance of correct reasoning may still be there, although there 
be a deficiency in the forms. A vague term, which they may 
never have given themselves the trouble to define, may yet, 
on each particular occasion ‘have excited in their minds pre- 
cisely the ideas it should excite. The leading word in an 
argument may be ambiguous; but between its two meanings 
there is often a secret link of connection, unobserved by the 
critic but felt by the author, though, perhaps, he may not 
have given himself a strictly logical account of it; and the 
conclusion may turn not upon what is different in the two 
meanings, but upon what they have in common, or at least 
analogous. 

Until logicians know these things, and act as if they 
knew them, they must not expect that a logician and a 
captious man will cease to be, in common apprehension, nearly 
synonymous. How, in fact, can it be otherwise in the mind of 
a person, who knows not very clearly what logic is, but who 
finds that he can in no way give utterance to his conviction 
without infringing logical rules, while he is conscious all 
the time that the real grounds of the conviction have not 
been touched in the slightest degree? 

It is only in a very qualified sense that these admonitions 
can be applied to Mr. Lewis; but there are so few persons 
of our time to whom they do not apply more or less (and, 
perhaps, there have been but few at any time), that we are 
not surprised to find them, even in his case, far from super- 
fluous. It remains for us to establish this by particular in- 
stances. 

Mr. Lewis, under the word right, gives a definition of 
legal rights, and then lays it down that all rights are the 
creatures of law, that is, of the will of the sovereign; that 
the sovereign himself has no rights, nor can any one have 


Appendix 129 


rights as against the sovereign; because, being sovereign, 
he is by that supposition exempt from legal obligation, or 
legal responsibility. So far, so good. Mr. Lewis then says, 
that to call anything a right which cannot be enforced by 
law, is an abuse of language. We answer,—Not until man- 
kind have consented to be bound by Mr. Lewis’ definition. 
For example, when Dr. Johnson says that a man has not 
a moral right to think as he pleased, ‘“‘because he ought to 
inform himself, and think justly,” Mr. Lewis says he must 
mean /egal right; and adds other observations, proving that 
he has not even caught a glimpse of Johnson’s drift. Again 
according to him, whoever asserts that no man can have 
a right to do that which is wrong, founds an argument upon 
a mere ambiguity, confounding a right with the adjective 
right: and this ambiguity is “mischievous, because it serves 
as an inducement to error, and confounds things as well 
as words.” 

Now, we contend that Mr. Lewis is here censuring what 
he does not thoroughly understand, and that the use of 
the word right, in both these cases, is as good logic and as 
good English as his own. Right is the correlative of duty, or 
obligation; and (with some limitations) is co-extensive with 
those terms. Whatever any man is under an obligation to 
give you, or to do for you, to that you have a right. There 
are legal obligations, and there are consequently legal rights. 
There are also moral obligations; and no one that we 
know of considers this phrase an abuse of language, or 
proposed that it should be dispensed with. It seems, therefore, 
but an adherence to the established usage of our language, 
to speak of moral rights; which stand in the same relation 
to moral obligations as legal rights do to legal obligations. 
All that is necessary is to settle distinctly with ourselves, and 
make it intelligible to those whom we are addressing, which 
kind of rights it is that we mean; if we fail in which, we 
become justly liable to Mr. Lewis’ censure. It has not totally 


130 Individualism Versus Individuality 


escaped Mr. Lewis that there may be some meaning in the 
phrase, moral rights; but he has, by no means, correctly 
hit that meaning. He expounds it thus,—‘‘claims recom- 
mended by views of justice or public policy”; the sort of 
claim a man may be said to have to anything which you 
think it desirable that he should possess. No such thing. No 
man in his sound senses considers himself to be wronged every 
time he does not get what he desires; every man distinguishes 
between what he thinks another man morally bound to do, 
and what he merely would like to see him do; between what 
is morally criminal, a fit subject for complaint or reproach, 
and what excites only regrets, and a wish that the act had 
been abstained from. No system of moral philosophy or meta- 
physics that we ever heard of, denies this distinction; though 
several have undertaken to account for it, and to place it 
upon the right footing. 

If you may say that it is the moral duty of subjects to 
obey their government, you may also express this by saying 
that government has a moral right to their obedience. If 
you may say that it is the moral duty of sovereigns to govern 
well, or else to abdicate, you may say that subjects have a 
right to be well governed. If you may say, that it is morally 
culpable in a government to attempt to retain its authority, 
contrary to the inclinations of its subjects; you may say, 
that the people have a right to change their government. 
All this, without any logical inaccuracy, or “abuse of lan- 
guage.” We are not defending this phraseology as the best 
that can be employed; the language of right and the language 
of duty, are logically equivalent, and the latter has, in many 
respects, the advantage. We are only contending, that, who- 
ever used the word right shall not be adjudged guilty of 
nonsense, until it has been tried whether this mode of inter- 
preting his meaning will make it sense. And this we com- 
plain that Mr. Lewis has not done. 

To explain what we meant by saying that almost every- 


Appendix Ii 


thing which Mr. Lewis sees has something lying under it 
which he does not see, we have now to show, that, in catching 
at an imaginary ambiguity near the surface, he has missed 
the deeper and less obvious ambiguities by which men are 
really misled. Iwo of these we shall briefly set forth. , 

Speaking morally, you are said to have a right to do a 
thing, if all persons are morally bound not to hinder you 
from doing it. But, in another sense, to have a right to do 
a thing is the opposite of having zo right to do it,—viz., of 
being under a moral obligation to forbear from doing it. 
In this sense, to say that you have a right to do a thing, 
means that you may do it without any breach of duty on 
your part; that other persons not only ought not to hinder 
you, but have no cause to think the worse of you for doing 
it. This is a perfectly distinct proposition from the preceding. 
The right which you have by virtue of a duty incumbent 
upon other persons, is obviously quite a different thing from 
a right consisting in the absence of any duty incumbent upon 
yourself. Yet the two things are perpetually confounded. 
Thus a man will say he has a right to publish his opinions; 
which may be true in this sense, that it would be a breach 
of duty in any other person to interfere and prevent the 
publication:—but he assumes thereupon, that in publishing 
his opinions, he himself violates no duty; which may either 
be true or false, depending, as it does, upon his having taken 
due pains to satisfy himself, first, that the opinions are true, 
and next, that their publication in this manner, and at this 
particular juncture, will probably be beneficial to the inter- 
ests of truth, on the whole. In this sense of the word, a 
man has no right to do that which is wrong, though it may 
often happen that nobody has a right to prevent him from 
doing it. 

The second ambiguity is that of confounding a right, 
of any kind, with a right to enforce that right by resisting 
or punishing a violation of it. Men will say, for example, 


132 Individualism Versus Individuality 


that they have a right to a good government; which is 
undeniably true, it being the moral duty of their governors 
to govern them well. But in granting this, you are supposed to 
have admitted their right or liberty to turn out their gover- 
nors, and, perhaps, to punish them, for having failed in 
the performance of this duty; which, far from being the 
same thing, is by no means universally true, but depends 
upon an immense number of varying circumstances, and is, 
perhaps, altogether the knottiest question in practical ethics. 
This example involves both the ambiguities which we have 
mentioned. 

We have dwelt longer on this one topic than the reader 
perhaps will approve. We shall pass more lightly over the 
remainder. 

Our author treats with unqualified contempt all that 
has been written by Locke and others, concerning a stage of 
nature and the social compact. In this we cannot altogether 
agree with him. The state of society contemplated by Rous- 
seau, in which mankind lived together without government, 
may never have existed, and it is of no consequence whether 
it did so or not. The question is not whether it ever existed, 
but whether there is any advantage in supposing it hypotheti- 
cally; as we assume in argument all kinds of cases which 
never occur, in order to illustrate those which do. All discus- 
sions respecting a state of nature are inquiries what morality 
would be if there were no law. This is the real scope of 
Locke’s Essay on Government, rightly understood ; whatever 
is objectionable in the details did not arise from the nature 
of the inquiry, but from a certain wavering and obscurity 
in his notion of the grounds of morality itself. Nor is this 
mode of viewing the subject, we conceive, without its advan- 
tages, in an enlarged view, either of morality or law. Not 
to mention that, as is observed by Locke himself, all inde- 
pendent governments, in relation to one another, are actually 
in a state of nature, subjects to moral duties but obeying no 


Appendix 133 


common superior ; so that the speculations which Mr. Lewis 
despises, tend, in international morality at least, to a direct 
practical application. 

Even the social compact (though a pure fiction, upon 
which no valid argument can consequently be founded), and 
the doctrine connected with it, of the inalienable and impre- 
scriptible rights of man, had this good in them, that they 
were suggested by a sense, that the power of the sovereign, 
although, of course, incapable of any legal limitation, has 
a moral limit, since a government ought not to take from any 
of its subjects more than it gives. Whatever obligation any 
man would lie under in a state of nature, not to inflict evil 
upon another for the sake of good to himself, that same 
obligation lies upon society towards every one of its members. 
If he injure or molest any of his fellow-citizens, the conse- 
quences of whatever they may be obliged to do in self- 
defense, must fall upon himself; but otherwise, the govern- 
ment fails of its duty, if on any plea of doing good to the 
community in the aggregate, it reduces him to such a state, 
that he is on the whole a loser by living in a state of govern- 
ment, and would have been better off if it did not exist. 
This is the truth which was dimly shadowed forth, in how- 
soever rude and unskillful a manner, in the theories of the 
social compact and of the right of man. It was felt, that a 
man’s voluntary consent to live under a government, was 
the surest proof he could give of his feeling it to be beneficial 
to him; and so great was the importance attached to this 
sort of assurance, that where an express consent was out 
of the question, some circumstance was fixed upon, from 
which, by stretching a few points, a consent might be pre- 
sumed. But the test is real, where, as in imperfectly settled 
countries, the forest is open to the man who is not contented 
with his lot. 

Notwithstanding the length to which our remarks have 
extended, we cannot overlook one or two passages, less 


134. Individualism Versus Individuality 


remarkable for their importance, than as proofs of the haste 
with which Mr. Lewis must have examined the authors 
and even the passages he has criticised. 

Thus, where Mr. Bentham recommends natural proced- 
ure in the administration of justice, in opposition to technical, 
Mr. Lewis observes, that as it is impossible to suppose. that 
any mode of judicial procedure should be left to the discre- 
tion of the judge guided by no rules, the word natural, in 
this case, “seems to be a vague term of praise, signifying 
that system which, to the writer, seems most expedient.” 
It shows but little knowledge of Mr. Bentham’s habits of 
mind, to account in this way of all others for any phraseology 
he may think proper to adopt. The fact is, as has been ex- 
plained a hundred times by Mr. Bentham himself, that 
by natural procedure, he means what he also calls domestic 
procedure; viz., the simple and direct mode of getting at 
the truth which suggests itself naturally,—that is readily and 
invariably, to all men who are inquiring in good earnest 
into any matter which, happening to concern them- 
selves, they are really desirous to ascertain. That the techni- 
cal methods of our own, and all other systems of law, are 
bad in proportion as they deviate from this, is what Mr. 
Bentham affirms, and, we will add, proves. 

Again, when Mr. Mill speaks of the corruptive operation 
of what are called the advantages of fortune, Mr. Lewis 
comments upon the strangeness of this sentiment from the 
writer of a treatise on Political Economy; that is, on the 
production and accumulation of wealth; and hints, that the 
work in question must have been composed with an object 
similar to that of a treatise on poisons. Did it never occur 
to Mr. Lewis, that Mr. Mill’s meaning might be, not that 
a people are corrupted by the amount of the wealth which 
they possess in the aggregate, but that the inequalities in the 
distribution of it have a tendency to corrupt those who obtain 
the large masses, especially when these come to them by 


Appendix 135 


descent, and not by merit, or any kind of exertion employed 
in earning them? 

To add one instance more, Mr. Lewis falls foul of the 
often quoted sentence of Tacitus, ‘that the most degenerate 
states have the greatest number of laws; in corruptissima 
republica plurimae leges; a position not only not true, but 
the very reverse of the truth, as the effect of the progress 
of civilization is to multiply enactments, in order to suit 
the extended relations, and the more refined and diversified 
forms of property, introduced by the improvement of society.” 
Mr. Lewis is a scholar, and understands the words of Tacitus, 
but, in this case it is clear, he has not understood the ideas. 
He has committed what he himself would call an ignoratio 
elenchi. By a corrupt society, Tacitus (we will take upon 
ourselves to assert) did not mean a rude society. The author 
was speaking of the decline of a nation’s morality, and the 
critic talks to you of the improvement of its industry. 
Tacitus meant, that, in the most immoral society, there is 
the most frequent occasion for the interposition of the legis- 
lator; and we venture to agree with him thinking it very 
clear that the less you are able to rely upon conscience and 
opinion, the more you are obliged to do by means of the 
law—a truth which is not only not the opposite of Mr. 
Lewis’ position, but stands in no logical relation to it at 
all, more than to the binomial theorem. 

These are the blemishes of Mr. Lewis’ work. Yet they 
do not induce us to qualify our high opinion, both of the 
book and of its author. It is an able, and a useful publication; 
only, it is not a sufficient dissertation on the use and abuse 
of the leading political terms. 

We have often thought, that a really philosophical Treat- 
ise on the Ambiguities of the Moral Sciences would be one 
of the most valuable scientific contributions which a man 
of first-rate intellectual ability could confer upon his age, 
and upon posterity. But it would not be so much a book of 


136 Individualism Versus Individuality 


criticism as of inquiry. Its main end would be, not to set 
people right in their use of words, which you never can be 
qualified to do, so long as their thoughts, on the subject 
treated of, are in any way different from yours; but to get 
at their thoughts through their words, and to see what sort 
of a view of truth can be got, by looking at it in their way. 
It would then be seen, how: multifarious are the properties 
and distinctions to be marked, and how few the words to 
mark them with, so that one word is sometimes all we have 
to denote a dozen different ideas, and that men go wrong 
less often than Mr. Lewis supposes, from using a word in 
many senses, but more frequently from using it only in one, 
the distinctions which it serves to mark in its other accepta- 
tions not being adverted to at all. Such a book would enable 
all kinds of thinkers, who are now at daggers-drawn, because 
they are speaking different dialects and know it not, to under- 
stand one another, and to perceive that, with the proper 
explanations, their doctrines are reconcilable; and would 
unite all the exclusive and one-sided systems, so long the 
bane of true philosophy, by placing before each man a more 
comprehensive view, in which the whole of what is afirma- 
tive in his own view would be included. 

This is the larger and nobler design which Mr. Lewis 
should set before himself, and which, we believe, his abilities 
to be equal to, did he but feel that this is the only task 
worthy of them. He might thus contribute a large part 
to what is probably destined to be the great philosophical 
achievement of the era, of which many signs already an- 
nounce the commencement: viz., to unite all half-truths, 
which have been fighting against one another ever since the 
creation, and blend them in one harmonious whole. 


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